Prospects for the observation of a Higgs boson with H→τ+τ−→l+l−p̸t associated with one high-PT jet at the LHC

Abstract We investigate the sensitivity of the LHC experiments to the Standard Model Higgs using H → τ τ → l + l − p t associated with one high- P T jet in the mass range 110 M H 150 GeV / c 2 . Cut and Neural Network based event selections are chosen to optimize the expected signal significance with this decay mode. A signal significance of about 6.2 σ can be achieved for M H = 120 GeV / c 2 with 30 fb −1 of integrated luminosity for one experiment only. Additionally, experimental issues related to tagging forward jets, reconstructing missing transverse momentum and the application of a central jet veto are simplified considerably.