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Higgs Boson Decay into a Pair of Leptons

The decay of a Higgs boson into a pair of W bosons h --> W^+W^-, is a dominant mode for Higgs boson masses above 135 GeV. At hadron colliders, searches for this decay focus on channels in which both W bosons decay leptonically into charged leptons, h --> W^+ W^- --> l^+ l^- plus missing energy. We show that semileptonic decays of heavy flavors are an important background to this signal. Lepton isolation provides too little suppression of heavy flavor contributions, and an additional 4 to 8 orders-of-magnitude suppression must come from physics cuts. An increase of the cut on the the minimum transverse momentum of non-leading leptons in multilepton events is one effective way to achieve the needed suppression, without appreciable loss of the Higgs boson signal.