English

Observation of Higgs boson decay to bottom quarks

High Energy Physics - Experiment 2018-09-26 v2

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 W or Z boson (VH), 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 41.3 fb1^{-1} of proton-proton collisions at s=\sqrt{s} = 13 TeV, are described. When combined with previous VH measurements using data collected at s=\sqrt{s}= 7, 8, and 13 TeV, an excess of events is observed at mH=m_\mathrm{H} = 125.09 GeV 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 1.01 ±\pm 0.22. The combination of this result with searches by the CMS experiment for H bb\to\mathrm{b\overline{b}} in other production processes yields an observed (expected) significance of 5.6 (5.5) standard deviations and a signal strength of 1.04 ±\pm 0.20.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1808.08242,
  title  = {Observation of Higgs boson decay to bottom quarks},
  author = {CMS Collaboration},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1808.08242},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

Replaced with the published version. Added the journal reference and the DOI. All the figures and tables, including additional supplementary figures and tables, can be found at http://cms-results.web.cern.ch/cms-results/public-results/publications/HIG-18-016 (CMS Public Pages)