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

TL;DR

This paper reports the first observation of the Higgs boson decaying into tau lepton pairs, using CMS data from 2016, confirming the Higgs-tau coupling with high significance.

Contribution

It presents the first single-experiment observation of Higgs decay to tau leptons, combining data from multiple LHC runs to measure the coupling strength.

Findings

Significance of 4.9 standard deviations in 2016 data

Combined significance of 5.9 standard deviations with previous data

Measured signal strength consistent with the Standard Model

Abstract

A measurement of the coupling strength of the Higgs boson to a pair of tau leptons is performed using events recorded in proton-proton collisions by the CMS experiment at the LHC in 2016 at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV. The data set corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 35.9 inverse femtobarns. The H to tau tau 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 to tau tau 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 tau leptons by a single experiment.