A: The CMS apparatus was identified, a few years before the start of the LHC operation at CERN, to feature properties well suited to particle-flow (PF) reconstruction: a highly-segmented tracker, a fine-grained electromagnetic calorimeter, a hermetic hadron calorimeter, a strong magnetic field, and an excellent muon spectrometer. A fully-fledged PF reconstruction algorithm tuned to the CMS detector was therefore developed and has been consistently used in physics analyses for the first time at a hadron collider. For each collision, the comprehensive list of final-state particles identified and reconstructed by the algorithm provides a global event description that leads to unprecedented CMS performance for jet and hadronic τ decay reconstruction, missing transverse momentum determination, and electron and muon identification. This approach also allows particles from pileup interactions to be identified and enables efficient pileup mitigation methods. The data collected by CMS at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV show excellent agreement with the simulation and confirm the superior PF performance at least up to an average of 20 pileup interactions. 3 Reconstruction of the particle-flow elements 9 3.1 Charged-particle tracks and vertices 9 3.1.

Combined measurements of the production and decay rates of the Higgs boson, as well as its couplings to vector bosons and fermions, are presented. The analysis uses the LHC proton–proton collision data set recorded with the CMS detector in 2016 at , corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 35.9 . The combination is based on analyses targeting the five main Higgs boson production mechanisms (gluon fusion, vector boson fusion, and associated production with a or boson, or a top quark-antiquark pair) and the following decay modes: , , , , , and . Searches for invisible Higgs boson decays are also considered. The best-fit ratio of the signal yield to the standard model expectation is measured to be , assuming a Higgs boson mass of . Additional results are given for various assumptions on the scaling behavior of the production and decay modes, including generic parametrizations based on ratios of cross sections and branching fractions or couplings. The results are compatible with the standard model predictions in all parametrizations considered. In addition, constraints are placed on various two Higgs doublet models.

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The observation of Higgs boson production in association with a top quark-antiquark pair is reported, based on a combined analysis of proton-proton collision data at center-of-mass energies of sqrt[s]=7, 8, and 13 TeV, corresponding to integrated luminosities of up to 5.1, 19.7, and 35.9  fb^{-1}, respectively. The data were collected with the CMS detector at the CERN LHC. The results of statistically independent searches for Higgs bosons produced in conjunction with a top quark-antiquark pair and decaying to pairs of W bosons, Z bosons, photons, τ leptons, or bottom quark jets are combined to maximize sensitivity. An excess of events is observed, with a significance of 5.2 standard deviations, over the expectation from the background-only hypothesis. The corresponding expected significance from the standard model for a Higgs boson mass of 125.09 GeV is 4.2 standard deviations. The combined best fit signal strength normalized to the standard model prediction is 1.26_{-0.26}^{+0.31}.

A measurement of the H → ττ signal strength is performed using events recorded in proton-proton collisions by the CMS experiment at the LHC in 2016 at a centerof-mass energy of 13 TeV. The data set corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 35.9 fb −1 . The H → ττ signal is established with a significance of 4.9 standard deviations, to be compared to an expected significance of 4.7 standard deviations. The best fit of the product of the observed H → ττ signal production cross section and branching fraction is 1.09 +0.27 −0.26 times the standard model expectation. The combination with the corresponding measurement performed with data collected by the CMS experiment at center-of-mass energies of 7 and 8 TeV leads to an observed significance of 5.9 standard deviations, equal to the expected significance. This is the first observation of Higgs boson decays to τ leptons by a single experiment.The central feature of the CMS apparatus is a superconducting solenoid of 6 m internal diameter, providing a magnetic field of 3.8 T. Within the solenoid volume, there are a silicon pixel and strip tracker, a lead tungstate crystal electromagnetic calorimeter (ECAL), and a brass and scintillator hadron calorimeter (HCAL), each composed of a barrel and two endcap sections. Forward calorimeters extend the pseudorapidity coverage provided by the barrel and endcap detectors. Muons are detected in gas-ionization chambers embedded in the steel flux-return yoke outside the solenoid.Events of interest are selected using a two-tiered trigger system [29]. The first level (L1), composed of custom hardware processors, uses information from the calorimeters and muon detectors to select events at a rate of around 100 kHz within a time interval of less than 4 µs. The 4 Event reconstruction second level, known as the high-level trigger (HLT), consists of a farm of processors running a version of the full event reconstruction software optimized for fast processing, and reduces the event rate to about 1 kHz before data storage.Significant upgrades of the L1 trigger during the first long shutdown of the LHC have benefitted this analysis, especially in the τ h τ h channel. These upgrades improved the τ h identification at L1 by giving more flexibility to object isolation, allowing new techniques to suppress the contribution from additional pp interactions per bunch crossing, and to reconstruct the L1 τ h object in a fiducial region that matches more closely that of a true hadronic τ decay. The flexibility is achieved by employing high bandwidth optical links for data communication and large field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) for data processing.A more detailed description of the CMS detector, together with a definition of the coordinate system used and the relevant kinematic variables, can be found in Ref. [30]. Simulated samplesSignal and background processes are modeled with samples of simulated events. The signal samples with a Higgs boson produced through gluon fusion (ggH), vector boson fusion (VBF), or in association with a W or Z boson (W...