High Energy Physics Seminar

Measurements of the Higgs boson and its interactions, especially at high energies, present the most promising avenue to discover physics beyond the standard model at the LHC. The decay of a Higgs boson to a bottom-antibottom quark pair - H(bb) - is a powerful channel for studying high energy Higgs production due to the distinctive boosted topology.  This talk will discuss the first simultaneous measurement of two Higgs boson production modes in this channel, which is based on the full 13 TeV dataset collected by the CMS detector. The H(bb) decay is isolated by selecting large-radius jets and exploiting jet substructure and dedicated heavy flavor taggers for boosted resonances based on machine learning techniques. Particle track and vertex information from the CMS silicon tracking detectors provide critical input to substructure and flavor algorithms, and future measurements in the H(bb) channel and others stand to benefit greatly from the addition of tracking information to the lowest level of hardware based selection. I will also discuss strategies for achieving this based on a novel approach to silicon detector readout electronics that integrates physics-motivated data reduction with machine learning.

The talk is in 469 Lauritsen.

Contact [email protected] for Zoom information