Search for a boosted Higgs boson decaying to bottom quark pairs in association with a W or Z boson in proton-proton collisions at √s=13 TeV

A search is conducted for standard model Higgs bosons with large transverse momentum (𝑝$_T$) decaying to bottom quark pairs and produced in association with a hadronically decaying W or Z boson at the LHC. The result is based on a dataset of proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeVcollected with the CMS detector in 2016–2018, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 138 fb$^{−1}$. Boosted Higgs, W, and Z boson decays are reconstructed using large-radius jets with 𝑝$_T$ > 450 GeV and identified with heavy-flavor classifiers based on a graph convolutional neural network. The observed signal strength relative to the standard model expectation is 𝜇 = 0.72$^{+0.75}_{−0.71}$ including statistical and systematic uncertainties.