Optimizing the Linear Collider Detector for the Measurement of the Higgs to Charm Branching.pdf

a r X i v : h e p - e x / 0 2 0 6 0 0 7 v 1 3 J u n 2 0 0 2 Optimizing the Linear Collider Detector for the Measurement of the Higgs to Charm Branching Ratio? TOSHINORI ABE and AARON S. CHOU Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, 2575 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park, CA, USA? Abstract Several different vertex detector designs for the Linear Collider Detector (LCD) are evaluated in the context of measurements of the branching ratio of the standard model Higgs particle decaying into charm/anti-charm final states. Fast Monte Carlo simulations are used to model the detector and neural network-optimized flavor tagging is used to perform the measurements. These tools are used to study the effects of pixel resolution, material thickness, and inner layer radius on the flavor tagging efficiency-purity curve and ultimately on the branching ratio measurement error. 1 Introduction A worldwide effort is now underway to develop a future Linear Collider and a corresponding Linear Collider Detector (LCD). Compromises may have to be made in the design of such a detector between its desired performance and other considerations such as the restrictions imposed by beam- related backgrounds in the interaction region as well as the total cost of the detector. In this paper, we use Monte Carlo simulations to model the performance of various detector configurations in the contexts of flavor tagging and sensitivity in the measurement of the branching ratio of a 120 GeV Higgs boson to charm/anti-charm final states. Such a measurement would help determine whether the condensation of a single Higgs boson is sufficient to generate the masses of particles. The dependence of the measurement precision on the various detector parameters used provides useful data for optimizing the final design of the detector. The branching ratios BR(H0 → cc?) and BR(H0 → bb?) may be simultaneously measured using the SLD technique [1] for measuring the the analogous quantities Rb and Rc in Z 0 decays. The branching ra