Evidence for a particle produced in association with weak bosons and decaying to a bottom-antibottom quark pair in Higgs boson searches at the Tevatron

摘要

We combine searches by the CDF and D0 Collaborations for the associatedproduction of a Higgs boson with a W or Z boson and subsequent decay of theHiggs boson to a bottom-antibottom quark pair. The data, originating fromFermilab Tevatron p-pbar collisions at sqrt{s}=1.96 TeV, correspond tointegrated luminosities of up to 9.7 fb^-1. The searches are conducted for aHiggs boson with mass in the range 100-150 GeV/c^2. We observe an excess ofevents in the data compared with the background predictions, which is mostsignificant in the mass range between 120 and 135 GeV/c^2. The largest localsignificance is 3.3 standard deviations, corresponding to a global significanceof 3.1 standard deviations. We interpret this as evidence for the presence of anew particle consistent with the standard model Higgs boson, which is producedin association with a weak vector boson and decays to a bottom-antibottom quarkpair.