Effects of Aging in the Hadronic Forward Calorimeter on the Vector Boson Fusion Higgs Search

Vector Boson Fusion (VBF) Higgs production is one of the methods that is being used to search for the existence of the Standard Model (SM) Higgs boson, and the Hadronic Forward Calorimeter (HF) is one of the main calorimeters in the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In this thesis, we looked at the effects of aging in the HF on the VBF Higgs search by using Fast Simulation to model accumulated radiation dosage effects. After proton-proton collisions at the LHC, vector bosons are radiated from quarks and a Higgs boson is produced. In this study, the Higgs boson is forced to decay into tau pairs. The VBF process produces two jets at low angles. We looked for two forward jets, reconstructed in HF and passing analysis thresholds. Thus, we observed jet tagging efficiencies for different levels of radiation damage in HF. Then, we compared the effect of radiation damage for different regions of HF, dividing HF into four regions. Analysis results showed that the VBF signal is not significantly diminished by the effects of aging in the HF.