Abstract
The observation of the standard model (SM) Higgs boson decay to a pair of bottom quarks is presented. The main contribution to this result is from processes in which Higgs bosons are produced in association with a or boson (), and are searched for in final states including 0, 1, or 2 charged leptons and two identified bottom quark jets. The results from the measurement of these processes in a data sample recorded by the CMS experiment in 2017, comprising of proton-proton collisions at , are described. When combined with previous measurements using data collected at , 8, and 13 TeV, an excess of events is observed at with a significance of 4.8 standard deviations, where the expectation for the SM Higgs boson is 4.9. The corresponding measured signal strength is . The combination of this result with searches by the CMS experiment for in other production processes yields an observed (expected) significance of 5.6 (5.5) standard deviations and a signal strength of .
- Received 24 August 2018
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.121801
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.
© 2018 CERN, for the CMS Collaboration
Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)
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Higgs Decay into Bottom Quarks Seen at Last
Published 17 September 2018
Two CERN experiments have observed the most probable decay channel of the Higgs boson—a milestone in the pursuit to confirm whether this remarkable particle behaves as physicists expect.
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