Physics & Astronomy Colloquium – Spring 2019 – Palmer

Speaker: Chris Palmer (Princeton University)

Title: Observation of the Higgs boson decaying to bottom quarks at CMS

Abstract: The Higgs boson decay to a bottom quark-antiquark pair has been sought for decades by the high energy community (i.e. at LEP and Tevatron). LHC experiments built analyses based on the experience of Tevatron experiments’ analysis techniques. With the observation of the Higgs boson at LHC during Run 1, the search for this decay channel became sharply focused. As the bottom quark pair channel is the most probable decay of the Higgs boson (58%), its observation is both important in terms of quantifying the Higgs boson and it represents an important milestone in high energy physics. The results presented use datasets from the LHC Run 1 and Run 2 (2016+2017) from CMS. This Run 2, 13 TeV dataset corresponds to an integrated luminosity of ~80 fb^-1. The analysis strategy, the background estimation techniques, and significant analysis improvements from the 2017 data analysis in CMS are shown. An outlook on the upcoming analysis of the full Run 2 dataset (and beyond) will be discussed.