Speaker
Description
The discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at the LHC was a landmark achievement in particle physics. In the decade since, its properties have been studied extensively and found to be consistent with Standard Model (SM) predictions. One key property that remains to be established is the coupling of the Higgs boson to second-generation quarks. The most direct probe of this coupling is the decay of the Higgs boson into a charm quark–antiquark pair, a measurement made challenging by the small branching ratio relative to the bottom-quark decay and by the difficulty of experimentally distinguishing charm jets from bottom- and light-flavor jets. This talk highlights the challenges of probing this process at the LHC and presents the first search for H→cc̄ in the vector-boson fusion production mode, extending the set of accessible production channels beyond associated production.