Aurelijus Rinkevicius

The importance of the $H\ensuremath{\rightarrow}ZZ\ensuremath{\rightarrow}4\ensuremath{\ell}$ ``golden'' channel was shown by its major role in the discovery, by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations, of a Higgs-like boson with mass near 125 GeV. We analyze the discrimination power of the matrix element method both for separating the signal from the irreducible $ZZ$ background and for distinguishing various spin and parity hypotheses describing a signal in this channel. We show that the proper treatment of interference effects associated with permutations of identical leptons in the $4e$ and $4\ensuremath{\mu}$ final states plays an important role in achieving the best sensitivity in measuring the properties of the newly discovered boson. We provide a code, mekd, that calculates kinematic discriminants based on the full leading-order matrix elements and which will aid experimentalists and phenomenologists in their continuing studies of the $H\ensuremath{\rightarrow}ZZ\ensuremath{\rightarrow}4\ensuremath{\ell}$ channel.

We present a general procedure for measuring the tensor structure of the coupling of the scalar Higgs-like boson recently discovered at the LHC to two Z bosons, including the effects of interference among different operators. To motivate our concern with this interference, we explore the parameter space of the couplings in the effective theory describing these interactions and illustrate the effects of interference on the differential dilepton mass distributions. Kinematic discriminants for performing coupling measurements that utilize the effects of interference are developed and described. We present projections for the sensitivity of coupling measurements that use these discriminants in future LHC operation in a variety of physics scenarios.

The "golden" channel, in which the newly-discovered Higgs boson decays to four leptons by means of intermediate vector bosons, is important for determining the properties of the Higgs boson and for searching for subtle new physics effects. Different approaches exist for parametrizing the relevant Higgs couplings in this channel; here we relate the use of pseudo-observables to methods based on specifying the most general amplitude or Lagrangian terms for the $HVV$ interactions. We also provide projections for sensitivity in this channel in several novel scenarios, illustrating the use of pseudo-observables, and analyze the role of kinematic distributions and (ratios of) rates in such $H\to4\ell$ studies.

A possibility to extend the universal GAEspAEr potential, used for obtaining the initial radial orbitals in iterative solving of quasirelativistic HartreenFock equations, is investigated. The extension is achieved via introduction of variable parameters instead of x ed ones that depend on the number of electrons in a conguration and the ionization degree of an atom.