Professor Daniela Bortoletto

Abstract:

A search for the standard model Higgs boson (H) decaying to bb̄ when produced in association with a weak vector boson (V) is reported for the following channels: W(μν)H, W(eν)H, W(τν)H, Z(μμ)H, Z(ee)H, and Z(νν)H. The search is performed in data samples corresponding to integrated luminosities of up to 5.1 inverse femtobarns at √s=7 TeV and up to 18.9 fb-1 at √s=8 TeV, recorded by the CMS experiment at the LHC. An excess of events is observed above the expected background with a local significance of 2.1 standard deviations for a Higgs boson mass of 125 GeV, consistent with the expectation from the production of the standard model Higgs boson. The signal strength corresponding to this excess, relative to that of the standard model Higgs boson, is 1.0±0.5. © 2014 CERN. Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

Abstract:

The inclusive cross section for top-quark pair production measured by the CMS experiment in proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV is compared to the QCD prediction at next-to-next-to-leading order with various parton distribution functions to determine the top-quark pole mass, m t pole , or the strong coupling constant, α S . With the parton distribution function set NNPDF2.3, a pole mass of 176. 7 +3.8 -3.4 GeV is obtained when constraining α S at the scale of the Z boson mass, m Z , to the current world average. Alternatively, by constraining m t pole to the latest average from direct mass measurements, a value of α S (m Z ) = 0. 1151 +0.0033 -0.0032 is extracted. This is the first determination of α S using events from top-quark production. © 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.