Observation of Higgs boson decay to bottom quarks
Abstract
The observation of the Standard Model Higgs boson decay to a bottom quark-antiquark pair is presented. The primary contribution to this result is from processes in which the Higgs boson is produced in association with a W or Z boson. The latest measurement of these processes is described, using 41.3 \fb\ of proton-proton collision data at center-of-mass energy $\sqrt{s}$ = 13 TeV, collected by the CMS experiment in 2017. The significance of the observed excess in data over Standard Model backgrounds is 3.3 standard deviations. The result is combined with similar measurements performed by CMS on previous datasets, resulting in an observed significance of 5.6 standard deviations. The measured signal is well consistent with the Standard Model expectation for a Higgs boson with $m_{\text{H}} = 125$ GeV decaying to bottom quarks, with a precision of 20\%.