Discovering Higgs Boson Decays to Lepton Jets at Hadron Colliders

The Higgs boson may decay predominantly into a hidden sector, producing lepton jets instead of the standard Higgs signatures. We propose a search strategy for such a signal at hadron colliders. A promising channel is the associated production of the Higgs boson with a Z or W. The dominant background is Z or W plus QCD jets. The lepton jets can be discriminated from QCD jets by cutting on the electromagnetic fraction and charge ratio. The former is the fraction of jet energy deposited in the electromagnetic calorimeter and the latter is the ratio of energy carried by charged particles to the electromagnetic energy. We use a Monte Carlo description of detector response to estimate QCD rejection efficiencies of O(10(-3)) per jet. The expected 5 sigma (3 sigma) discovery reach in Higgs boson mass is similar to 115 GeV (150 GeV) at the Tevatron with 10 fb(-1) of data and similar to 110 GeV (130 GeV) at the 7 TeV LHC with 1 fb(-1).