Observation and measurement of Higgs boson decays to WW* with the ATLAS detector

We report the observation of Higgs boson decays to WW* based on an excess over background of 6.1 standard deviations in the dilepton final state, where the Standard Model expectation is 5.8 standard deviations. Evidence for the vector-boson fusion (VBF) production process is obtained with a significance of 3.2 standard deviations. The results are obtained from a data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 25??fb-1 from vs=7 and 8 TeV pp collisions recorded by the ATLAS detector at the LHC. For a Higgs boson mass of 125.36 GeV, the ratio of the measured value to the expected value of the total production cross section times branching fraction is 1.09 +0.16-0.15(stat) +0.17-0.14(syst). The corresponding ratios for the gluon fusion and vector-boson fusion production mechanisms are 1.02±0.19(stat) +0.22-0.18(syst) and 1.27 +0.44-0.40(stat) +0.30-0.21(syst), respectively. At vs=8??TeV, the total production cross sections are measured to be s(gg?H?WW*)=4.6±0.9(stat) +0.8-0.7(syst)??pb and s(VBFH?WW*)=0.51 +0.17-0.15(stat) +0.13-0.08(syst)??pb. The fiducial cross section is determined for the gluon-fusion process in exclusive final states with zero or one associated jet.