Speaker
Description
A crucial element of the study of the Higgs boson is the measurement of its couplings to the fermions of the second generation. Experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have recently reported the first evidence for the Higgs boson coupling to the muon. It is equally important to measure the Higgs boson coupling to the charm and strange quarks. These decay modes are nearly impossible to measure with precision at the LHC due to the limited detector capabilities and large irreducible backgrounds. The situation is better at e+e- colliders, but the identification of strange quark decays of the Higgs boson remains a challenge. One needs an efficient algorithm to distinguish jets originating from strange quarks from those initiated by lighter quarks. Also, one must deal with backgrounds due to strange production in heavy-quark jets. In this talk we will present a first version of a strange quark tagger and the first projected sensitivity estimates for the coupling of the Higgs boson to strange quarks at future e+e- colliders . The studies make use of the International Large Detector (ILD) simulations for the International Linear Collider, but the methodology and the results are expected to be similar for other proposed e+e- Higgs factories.
