Sensitivity to an Invisibly Decaying Higgs Boson

Many extensions of the Standard Model include Higgs bosons decaying predominantly or partially to non-interacting particles such as the SUSY Lightest Supersymmetric Particle (LSP). To set limits on the production cross-section times the branching fraction to invisible decay products of such Higgs bosons with the ATLAS detector requires an examination of specific production modes such as the associated production (ZH) or the vector boson fusion (VBF) process. The predominant Standard Model backgrounds for these processes are ZZ to nunu for the ZH channel and jets from QCD processes and W or Z bosons produced in association with jets for the VBF channel. The sensitivity to an invisibly decaying Higgs boson is investigated in this paper using fully simulated ATLAS data for both signal and background. The ATLAS potential for triggering these events is also discussed.