Erlangen 2026 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik

T 98: Higgs Physics X

T 98.4: Vortrag

Freitag, 20. März 2026, 09:45–10:00, KH 02.013

Search for H → c c in the Vector Boson Fusion Channel with CMS Run-3 Data — •Jialiang Sun, Konstantinos Nikolopoulos, and Philipp Gadow — University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

Quark Yukawa couplings to the Higgs boson have so far been experimentally established only for the third generation. Observation of Higgs decays to a charm quark-antiquark pair would provide direct access to the charm Yukawa coupling, testing the Higgs coupling to second-generation quarks and probing potential deviations from the Standard Model. Currently, the most stringent constraints on this coupling are obtained by searches for associated Higgs production with a vector boson or a top-quark pair. Further improvements are expected by combining these results with the vector boson fusion (VBF) production mode using Run-3 data. In this talk we present a sensitivity study of Higgs decays to a charm quark-antiquark pair in the VBF channel, using CMS proton-proton collision data collected in 2024 at a center-of-mass energy of 13.6 TeV. Backgrounds from QCD multijet production and Z/W+jets are estimated using data-driven methods. A boosted decision tree is trained to suppress the overwhelming QCD background, and a preliminary expected upper limit on the H → c c signal strength is derived.

Keywords: Higgs; Charm Yukawa coupling; Vector boson fusion; CMS; LHC