Measurement of the Higgs boson decay to a low-mass dilepton system and a photon in $pp$ collisions at $\sqrt{s} =$ 13 and 13.6 TeV with the ATLAS detector

Abstract

A measurement is presented for the Higgs boson decaying into a photon and a pair of electrons or muons with an invariant mass $m_{\ell\ell} <$ 30 GeV, using $pp$ collision data at $\sqrt{s} =$ 13.6 TeV recorded by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider during the years 2022-2024, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 164 fb$^{-1}$. 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 measured to be $\mu = 0.64^{+0.44}_{-0.39}$ compared with the expected value of $\mu = 1.00^{+0.47}_{-0.41}$. The corresponding observed (expected) signal significance is 1.7 (2.5) standard deviations under the background-only hypothesis. The result is combined with a similar search performed using 139 fb$^{-1}$ of $pp$ collision data at $\sqrt{s} =$ 13 TeV collected during the years 2015-2018. This combination gives an observed (expected) signal strength of $\mu = 1.03^{+0.35}_{-0.32}\,(\mu = 1.00^{+0.34}_{-0.32})$, corresponding to an observed (expected) significance of 3.4 (3.3) standard deviations.