Search for WH associated production in 5.3 fb^-1 of pp ‾collisions at the fermilab tevatron

Abstract

We present a search for associated production of Higgs and W bosons in pp‾ collisions at a center of mass energy of √s=1.96 TeV in 5.3 fb^-1 of integrated luminosity recorded by the D0 experiment. Multivariate analysis techniques are applied to events containing one lepton, an imbalance in transverse energy, and one or two b-tagged jets to discriminate a potential WH signal from Standard Model backgrounds. We observe good agreement between data and expected backgrounds, and set an upper limit of 4.5 (at 95% confidence level and for mH=115 GeV) on the ratio of the WH cross section multiplied by the branching fraction of H → bb‾ to its Standard Model prediction, which is consistent with an expected limit of 4.8.