Benchmarking simplified template cross sections in WH production

Abstract

Simplified template cross sections define a framework for the measurement and dissemination of kinematic information in Higgs measurements. We benchmark the currently proposed setup in an analysis of dimension-6 effective field theory operators for WH production. Calculating the Fisher information allows us to quantify the sensitivity of this framework to new physics and study its dependence on phase space. New machine-learning techniques let us compare the simplified template cross section framework to the full, high-dimensional kinematic information. We show that the way in which we truncate the effective theory has a sizable impact on the definition of the optimal simplified template cross sections.