Search for a Higgs Boson Decaying into Two Photons at LEP.pdfVIP

EUROPEAN ORGANIZATION FOR NUCLEAR RESEARCH CERN-EP/2002-010 February 6, 2002 Search for a Higgs Boson Decaying into Two Photons at LEP 2 0 0 2 r a M 2 The L3 Collaboration 1 1 v 6 1 0 3 0 2 Abstract 0 / x A Higgs particle produced in association with a Z boson and decaying into two e - photons is searched for in the data collected by the L3 experiment at LEP. All p possible decay modes of the Z boson are investigated. No signal is observed in 447.5 e h pb−1 of data recorded at centre-of-mass energies from 192 GeV up to 209 GeV. : v Limits on the branching fraction of the Higgs boson decay into two photons as a i function of the Higgs mass are derived. A lower limit on the mass of a fermiophobic X r Higgs boson is set at 105.4 GeV at 95% confidence level. a Submitted to Phys. Lett. B Introduction The Standard Model of the electroweak interactions allows the decay of a Higgs boson h into a photon pair only at the one loop level. The branching fraction of this decay is small [1]. It amounts to about 0.1% for Higgs masses mh between 80 and 110 GeV. Several extensions of the Standard Model predict enhancements of this branching fraction [2]. For instance, an appropriate choice of the parameters of the Two Higgs Doublet Models of Type I [3], predicts the lightest CP even Higgs not to couple to fermions at tree level. Such a Higgs is expected to decay dominantly into a pair of photons if its mass is below 90 GeV [4]. In Higgs triplet m