The search for the Higgs boson is one of the main goals in High Energy Physics and one of the highest priorities at Run II of the Tevatron. There are many alternative Higgs boson models beyond the SM, including Supersymmetry (SUSY) and Fermiophobic Higgs bosons, which can actively be probed at the Tevatron, and in the absence of an excess constrained. The latest limits for several SUSY searches are presented in Section 2 and for the Fermiophobic Higgs boson searches in Section 3. More information on all these searches, along with the latest results, can be found on the CDF and D0 public results webpages. Results are presented for beyond the Standard Model Higgs boson searches using up to 4.2 fb−1 of data from Run II at the Tevatron. No significant excess is observed in any of the channels so 95% confidence level limits are presented.

In this thesis a direct search for the Standard Model Higgs boson production in association with a W boson at the CDF detector in the Tevatron is presented. This search contributes predominantly in the region of low mass Higgs region, when the mass of Higgs boson is less than about 135 GeV. The search is performed in a final state where the Higgs boson decays into two b quarks, and the W boson decays leptonically, to a charged lepton (it can be an electron or a muon) and a neutrino. This work is organized as follows. Chapter 2 gives an overview of the Standard Model theory of particle physics and presents the SM Higgs boson search results at LEP, and the Tevatron colliders, as well as the prospects for the SM Higgs boson searches at the LHC. The dataset used in this analysis corresponds to 4.8 fb−1 of integrated luminosity of p{bar p} collisions at a center of mass energy of 1.96 TeV. That is the luminosity acquired between the beginning of the CDF Run II experiment, February 2002, and May 2009. The relevant aspects, for this analysis, of the Tevatron accelerator and the CDF detector are shown in Chapter 3. In Chapter 4 the particles and observables that make up the WH final state, electrons, muons, E{sub T}, and jets are presented. The CDF standard b-tagging algorithms to identify b jets, and the neural network flavor separator to distinguish them from other flavor jets are also described in Chapter 4. The main background contributions are those coming from heavy flavor production processes, such as those coming from Wbb, Wcc or Wc and tt. The signal and background signatures are discussed in Chapter 5 together with the Monte CArlo generators that have been used to simulate almost all the events used in this thesis. WH candidate events have a high-p{sub T} lepton (electron or muon), high missing transverse energy, and two or more than two jets in the final state. Chapter 6 describes the event selection applied in this analysis and the method used to estimate the background contribution. The Matrix Element method, that was successfully used in the single t0p discovery analysis and many other analyses within the CDF collaboration, is the multivariate technique used in this thesis to discriminate signal from background events. With this technique is possible to calculate a probability for an event to be classified as signal or background. These probabilities are then combined into a discriminant function called the Event Probability Discriminant, EPD, which increases the sensitivity of the WH process. This method is described in detail in Chapter 7. As no evidence for the signal has been found, the results obtained with this work are presented in Chapter 8 in terms of exclusion regions as a function of the mass of the Higgs boso, taking into account the full systematics. The conclusions of this work to obtain the PhD are presnted in Chapter 9.

The recent observation of the Higgs boson has been hailed as the scientific discovery of the century and led to the 2013 Nobel Prize in physics. This book describes the detailed science behind the decades-long search for this elusive particle at the Large Electron Positron Collider at CERN and at the Tevatron at Fermilab and its subsequent discovery and characterization at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Written by physicists who played leading roles in this epic search and discovery, this book is an authoritative and pedagogical exposition of the portrait of the Higgs boson that has emerged from a large number of experimental measurements. As the first of its kind, this book should be of interest to graduate students and researchers in particle physics.

The theoretical foundations of the Standard Model of elementary particles relies on the existence of the Higgs boson, a particle which has been revealed for the first time by the experiments run at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2012. As the Higgs boson is an unstable particle, its search strategies were based on its decay products. In this thesis, Francesco Pandolfi conducted a search for the Higgs boson in the H → ZZ → l + l - qq Decay Channel with 4.6 fb -1 of 7 TeV proton-proton collision data collected by the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment. The presence of jets in the final state poses a series of challenges to the experimenter: both from a technical point of view, as jets are complex objects and necessitate of ad-hoc reconstruction techniques, and from an analytical one, as backgrounds with jets are copious at hadron colliders, therefore analyses must obtain high degrees of background rejection in order to achieve competitive sensitivity. This is accomplished by following two directives: the use of an angular likelihood discriminant, capable of discriminating events likely to originate from the decay of a scalar boson from non-resonant backgrounds, and by using jet parton flavor tagging, selecting jets compatible with quark hadronization and discarding jets more likely to be initiated by gluons. The events passing the selection requirements in 4.6 fb -1 of data collected by the CMS detector are examined, in the search of a possible signal compatible with the decay of a heavy Higgs boson. The thesis describes the statistical tools and the results of this analysis. This work is a paradigm for studies of the Higgs boson with final states with jets. The non-expert physicists will enjoy a complete and eminently readable description of a proton-proton collider analysis. At the same time, the expert reader will learn the details of the searches done with jets at CMS.

Searches for the Standard Model Higgs boson at a center-of-mass energy of √s = 1.96 TeV, using up to 5.4 fb−1 of data collected with the CDF and D0 detectors at the Fermilab Tevatron collider in the mass range around 160 GeV/c2 are presented. As no significant excess is observed, limits on standard-model Higgs boson production are set.