Evidence for Higgs boson decay to a pair of muons

2020/09/30 by CMS Collaboration, A. M. Sirunyan, A. Tumasyan +98
Physics and Astronomy · #Boson #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Higgs boson #Muon #Neutrino Physics Research #Nuclear physics #Particle decay #Particle physics #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Physics #hep-ex

paper · pdf · doi:10.1007/jhep01(2021)148

published as JHEP 01 (2021) 148 · 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-19-006 (CMS Public Pages)

openalex created_date 2020/09/21 · openalex publication_date 2021/01/01 · arxiv created 2021/01/31 · arxiv updated 2021/02/02 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06

Abstract

A bstract Evidence for Higgs boson decay to a pair of muons is presented. This result combines searches in four exclusive categories targeting the production of the Higgs boson via gluon fusion, via vector boson fusion, in association with a vector boson, and in association with a top quark-antiquark pair. The analysis is performed using proton-proton collision data at √(s) <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mml:msqrt><mml:mi>s</mml:mi></mml:msqrt></mml:math> = 13 TeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 137 fb − 1 , recorded by the CMS experiment at the CERN LHC. An excess of events over the back- ground expectation is observed in data with a significance of 3.0 standard deviations, where the expectation for the standard model (SM) Higgs boson with mass of 125.38 GeV is 2.5. The combination of this result with that from data recorded at √(s) <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mml:msqrt><mml:mi>s</mml:mi></mml:msqrt></mml:math> = 7 and 8 TeV, corresponding to integrated luminosities of 5.1 and 19.7 fb − 1 , respectively, increases both the expected and observed significances by 1%. The measured signal strength, relative to the SM prediction, is 1.19_-0.39^+0.40(stat)_-0.14^+0.15(syst) <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mml:msubsup><mml:mn>1.19</mml:mn><mml:mrow><mml:mo>−</mml:mo><mml:mn>0.39</mml:mn></mml:mrow><mml:mrow><mml:mo>+</mml:mo><mml:mn>0.40</mml:mn></mml:mrow></mml:msubsup><mml:msubsup><mml:mfenced><mml:mtext>stat</mml:mtext></mml:mfenced><mml:mrow><mml:mo>−</mml:mo><mml:mn>0.14</mml:mn></mml:mrow><mml:mrow><mml:mo>+</mml:mo><mml:mn>0.15</mml:mn></mml:mrow></mml:msubsup><mml:mfenced><mml:mtext>syst</mml:mtext></mml:mfenced></mml:math> . This result constitutes the first evidence for the decay of the Higgs boson to second generation fermions and is the most precise measurement of the Higgs boson coupling to muons reported to date.

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