Search for associated production of Z and Higgs bosons in proton-antiproton collisions at 1.96 TeV.

Abstract

We present a search for associated production of Z and Higgs bosons in 4.2/fb of ppbar collisions at sqrt{s} = 1.96 TeV, produced in RunII of the Tevatron and recorded by the D0 detector. The search is performed in events containing at least two muons and at least two jets. The ZH signal is distinguished from the expected backgrounds by means of multivariate classifiers known as random forests. Binned random forest output distributions are used in comparing the data to background-only and signal+background hypotheses. No excess is observed in the data, so we set upper limits on ZH production with a 95% confidence level.