Evidence for Higgs boson decays to a low-mass dilepton system and a photon in $pp$ collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector

A search for the Higgs boson decaying into a photon and a pair of electrons or muons with an invariant mass $m_{\ell\ell} < 30$ GeV is presented. The analysis is performed using 139 fb$^{-1}$ of proton-proton collision data, produced by the LHC at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV and collected by the ATLAS experiment. Evidence for the $H\to\ell\ell\gamma$ process is found with a significance of $3.2\sigma$ over the background-only hypothesis, compared to an expected significance of $2.1\sigma$. The best-fit value of the signal strength parameter, defined as the ratio of the observed signal yield to the one expected in the Standard Model, is $\mu = 1.5 \pm 0.5$. The Higgs boson production cross-section times the $H \rightarrow\ell\ell\gamma$ branching ratio for $m_{\ell\ell} < 30$ GeV is determined to be $8.7~^{+2.8}_{-2.7}~\text{fb}$.