The Higgs boson couplings to fermions and vector bosons has been well established since its discovery. For lighter particles, such as second generation fermions like the charm quark, the weaker coupling strength of the Higgs boson makes measurements significantly more challenging.
In this seminar, we present the latest search for a Higgs boson decaying directly to cc pairs using the VH and gluon-fusion production modes with the full Run-2 CMS dataset. The search uses novel ML techniques to identify secondary vertices from (boosted) charm-jet decays to tag signal events and set limits on the H->cc decay rate and Higgs-charm coupling. The analyses are also sensitive to the decay of a Z boson to charm quarks, and the Z->cc process is observed for the first time in a hadron collider.
Michelangelo Mangano, Monica Pepe-Altarelli and Pedro Silva