A search for the standard model Higgs boson decaying to charm quarks

Understand

A direct search for the standard model Higgs boson, H, produced in association with a vector boson, V (W or Z), and decaying to a charm quark pair is presented.

• The search uses a data set of proton-proton collisions corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 35.9 fb$^{-1}$, collected by the CMS experiment at the LHC in 2016, at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV.
• The search is carried out in mutually exclusive channels targeting specific decays of the vector bosons: W $\to$ $\ell \nu$, Z $\to$ $\ell\ell$, and Z $\to$ $\nu\nu$, where $\ell$ is an electron or a muon.
• To fully exploit the topology of the H boson decay, two strategies are followed.