Deadline: 8 August 2024

Report on JHEP_352P_0524
Date: July 9, 2024

REPORT JHEP_352P_0524
Author(s): ATLAS Collaboration
Title: Search for non-resonant Higgs boson pair production in final states
with leptons, taus, and photons in $pp$ collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 13 TeV
with the ATLAS detector

Received: 2024-05-31 09:38:56.0

Referee report
Dear authors, congratulations for this interesting paper.
The paper presents a multichannel search for double Higgs production by
the ATLAS collaboration at the LHC. The paper builds on previous HH
analyses performed by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations. While each of
the channels considered in this paper might not be competitive with more
established results such as bbγγ or bbτ τ individually, the approach exploited
in the paper of looking at the same moment at several subdominant channels
is original and interesting. It clearly shows the good progresses the LHC
collaboration are making in tackling this challenging subject and the results
can improve significantly on the current HH measurements. The manuscript
is well written, covering in details all the analyses entering this combina-
tion, background sources and their treatment and the objects used in the
analyses, and with very interesting insights on the correspondences between
each channel and each HH production mode. The treatment of the system-
atic uncertainties instead is a bit short, and could benefit from some slight
improvements. The analysis looks very solid, and the results are consistent
throughout the paper, although I believe using the SM hypothesis instead of
the background-only one as expectation would provide more clarity. There
are a few small notation inconsistencies and improvements on the text that I
believe could be fixed during the editorial process, but otherwise the paper is
clear and well written. The paper itself is complete, with almost all necessary
references included in the results, although some of them have been updated
during the submission process.
I therefore recommend this paper to be sent back to the authors for minor
revisions. You can find below some more details.

1
General remarks
1. In several places in the text, you write only Higgs to refer to a Higgs
boson, for example as in Higgs self-coupling. I think always using Higgs
boson (or H) would be better, since strictly speaking Higgs is the late

REPORT JHEP_352P_0524
prof. Peter Higgs.
2. It seems that the suffixes LO and NLO in the PDF sets names are
always smaller than the rest of the word. For example, NNPDF2.3LO
at the end of page 6. Is this something meant to be?

Introduction
1. page 2, additional scalar particles. Why only scalar ? Also non scalars
would show in the trilinear coupling, as long as they are massive and
couples to the Higgs boson.
2. The ggHH and VBFHH cross-sections are outdated. The VBFHH
cross-section has been updated in May and is now 1.69 ± 2.8%fb, while
the ggHH was updated a few days ago to 30.77fb, as reported on the
LHCHWG(WG4) pages. I understand these updates probably arrived
late in the editorial process, but is there any chance to include the
updated numbers in these results?
3. page 3, references [18-22], I believe you are missing A. Dreyer, A.
Karlberg, J. Lang, and M. Pellen Eur.Phys.J.C 80 (2020) 11, 1037
arXiv:2005.13341, which extends the calculation to N3LO+NLO EW
4. page 3, last paragraph. 140fb−1 of data.

Data and simulated event samples

1. page 7, first paragraph. You mention that ggHH signals samples are
generated for kλ = 1, 10 but in the next line you also mention kλ = 0.
Should kλ = 0 also be mentioned in the previous sentence?
2. page 7, first paragraph. It is not clear to me how it is possible to use the
kλ = 10 sample to validate the reweighting procedure, since this is one
of the 3 samples used to perform the linear combination. Shouldn’t
you need a fourth, independent samples to validate the procedure?
The kλ = 10 samples should agree with the reweighted SM sample by
definition.

2
Object definitions
1. page 8, last paragraph. In the 4l+2b, you significantly lower the pT
thresholds for electrons and muons. Do you need to correct for trigger
efficiencies turn-on? How is such a correction applied? I found no

REPORT JHEP_352P_0524
mention of it in the text.

2. In several places in this section. For electrons, photons, and muons, you
refer to tight/loose/medium working points for ID and ISO. Can you
please provide the efficiencies/rejection power for each of these working
points, as you do later on for the BDT efficiencies?

3. For electron and muons, can you please provide the overall efficiencies
as you do for taus and photons? It would be nice to have the

4. For electron and muons, can you please provide the overall efficiencies
as you do for taus and photons? It would be nice to include also the
contamination you have in each WP as well.

5. Page 11, third paragraph. Can you add a short sentence explaining
what the jet-vertex tagger is?

6. Page 11, fourth paragraph, first sentence. I would rewrite it as b-jets,

i.e. jets containing b-hadrons ...

7. Page 12, fist paragraph. no signal or data events... What about simu-
lated bakgrounds events? Is there any double counting in background?
Although since there’s no double counted data events this should not
be a big issue.

Search strategy
1. page 15, end of first paragraph. It is not clear to me why using a
BDT trained on the output of 3 other BDTs improves the results with
respect using a single BDT. In principle, the information used is always
the same so I would expect the results to be the same. How much does
the final result improves with the 3+1 strategy? Did you chech on a
separate sample there was no overtraining in the last BDT? If so, can
you share the results of such validation?

2. figure 6a. It seems that the MC consistently underestimated the data

in the 4l+2b channel. This is of course more pronounced in the prefit
but it is still visible in the post-fit. Could it be some background

3
 sources are missing? For example I expect the qqZZ/ggZZ ratio to be
different under the H peak with respect to the CR and VR. Has this
been considered? Although, I don’t think qqZZ alone could explain
such a large effect.

REPORT JHEP_352P_0524
Background estimation
1. When you refer to a region as a single bin, I suppose this means that
you are not using shape uncertainty there but instead performing a
cut and count procedure there, is it right? I think the text would be
easier to read by removing the single bin text anywhere it appears and
just mention where shapes are used, or saying that in those CR only
the overall normalisation is considered or something else along these
lines. A single bin distribution is something a bit strange (although I
understand this is probably the way it is included in the fit)

2. prompt leptons and non-prompt leptons. Throughout this section, it

would be better to replace µ with normalisation factor, as it is done
already in section 7.3. First of all, you never introduced the signal
strength, and secondly this is not actually a signal strength since you
are not discussing signal yet.

3. Still on the normalisation factors, the text lacks any explanations on

how these factors have been derived. While the uncertainty is clearly a
useful information, without this context the actual number is not very
relevant. Can you do like you do in section 7.3 and add details on how
these numbers are derived?

Systematic uncertainties
1. First line. uncertainty ON the number of data...

2. section 8.1, first line. uncertainty ON the combined...

3. There is nothing mentioned in this section on the correlation scheme

between different uncertainties. Given the importance of the combined
result for this manuscript, I believe it would be necessary to spend some
time describing which NP are correlated across channels and how.

4
Statistical treatment and results
1. Page 27, first line. This is the first time a signal strength is men-
tioned/defined. Maybe it would be worth mentioning it in the intro-
duction already?

REPORT JHEP_352P_0524
2. Page 27, first paragraph. It would be better to change to an HH signal
to to the presence of an HH signal

3. figure 8 (and consequently elsewhere in the text). While it could be

interesting to know the limits in the background-only model, the most
natural baseline to compare is clearly the SM hypothesis, kλ = 1. In
the end, our expectation is clearly the SM, not kλ = 0. Can you change
figure 8 to report the SM as expected instead of kλ = 0? The same
should apply in this section and the results. I understand the numbers
popping up from the figure would look slightly worst (12 instead of
11), but the SM is the actual baseline to compare. This would also
make the last paragraph of the Conclusions self-consistent, since at the
moment expected is used assuming the SM for the confidence interval,
and background-only for the signal strength, while it would be better
to have the same meaning in both cases.

Conclusions
1. As a follow-up of the previous comment, I would suggest to write Ob-
served (expected) limits of 17 (12) times the SM prediction are set on
the HH signal strength (11 under the background-only hypothesis).