High Energy Physics Seminar

https://caltech.zoom.us/j/6661096278

The CMS collaboration recently presented their results on the Higgs decay to a pair of muons with 137 fb ^{-1} of data at sqrt(s) = 13 TeV. The analysis targeted four different production modes, the gluon fusion (ggH) , the vector boson fusion (VBF), the Higgs- strahlung process (VH) and the production in association with a pair of top quarks (ttH). Each of these categories had developed it's own dedicated boosted decision tree (BDT) or a deep neural-network (DNN) to efficiently separate the signal from the major background processes. The VBF category used a template based fit to the DNN score whereas the remaining categories performed data-driven fits to the dimuon mass spectrum. A combined fit from all these categories sees a slight excess in the data corresponding to 3.0 standard deviations at Mh = 125.38 GeV (the most precise measurement of the Higgs boson mass to date). This is the first evidence for the Higgs Boson decay to second generation fermions and is thus an exciting result. In this talk, I'll give more details on how this complicated measurement was carried out.