Observation of the Higgs boson decay to a pair of τ leptons with the CMS detector

Abstract

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...

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