Understand
A search is presented for pairs of light pseudoscalar bosons, in the mass range from 4 to 15 GeV, produced from decays of the 125 GeV Higgs boson.
- The decay modes considered are final states that arise when one of the pseudoscalars decays to a pair of tau leptons, and the other one either into a pair of tau leptons or muons.
- The search is based on proton-proton collisions collected by the CMS experiment in 2016 at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV that correspond to an integrated luminosity of 35.9 fb${-1}$.
- The 2$\mu$2$\tau$ and 4$\tau$ channels are used in combination to constrain the product of the Higgs boson production cross section and the branching fraction into 4$\tau$ final state, $\sigma\mathcal{B}$, exploiting the linear dependence of the fermionic coupling strength of pseudoscalar bosons on the fermion mass.