A: The CMS apparatus was identified, a few years before the start of the LHC operation at CERN, to feature properties well suited to particle-flow (PF) reconstruction: a highly-segmented tracker, a fine-grained electromagnetic calorimeter, a hermetic hadron calorimeter, a strong magnetic field, and an excellent muon spectrometer. A fully-fledged PF reconstruction algorithm tuned to the CMS detector was therefore developed and has been consistently used in physics analyses for the first time at a hadron collider. For each collision, the comprehensive list of final-state particles identified and reconstructed by the algorithm provides a global event description that leads to unprecedented CMS performance for jet and hadronic τ decay reconstruction, missing transverse momentum determination, and electron and muon identification. This approach also allows particles from pileup interactions to be identified and enables efficient pileup mitigation methods. The data collected by CMS at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV show excellent agreement with the simulation and confirm the superior PF performance at least up to an average of 20 pileup interactions. 3 Reconstruction of the particle-flow elements 9 3.1 Charged-particle tracks and vertices 9 3.1.

2018 JINST 13 P05011 8.5 Measurement of the data-to-simulation scale factors as a function of the discriminator value 76 8.6 Comparison of the measured data-to-simulation scale factors 79 9 Measurement of the tagging efficiency for boosted topologies 82 9.1 Comparison of data with simulation 82 9.2 Efficiency for subjets 83 9.2.1 Misidentification probability 83 9.2.2 Measurement of the b tagging efficiency 84 9.3 Efficiency of the double-b tagger 86 9.3.1 Measurement of the double-b tagging efficiency 86 9.3.2 Measurement of the misidentification probability for top quarks 87

Combined measurements of the production and decay rates of the Higgs boson, as well as its couplings to vector bosons and fermions, are presented. The analysis uses the LHC proton–proton collision data set recorded with the CMS detector in 2016 at , corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 35.9 . The combination is based on analyses targeting the five main Higgs boson production mechanisms (gluon fusion, vector boson fusion, and associated production with a or boson, or a top quark-antiquark pair) and the following decay modes: , , , , , and . Searches for invisible Higgs boson decays are also considered. The best-fit ratio of the signal yield to the standard model expectation is measured to be , assuming a Higgs boson mass of . Additional results are given for various assumptions on the scaling behavior of the production and decay modes, including generic parametrizations based on ratios of cross sections and branching fractions or couplings. The results are compatible with the standard model predictions in all parametrizations considered. In addition, constraints are placed on various two Higgs doublet models.

The observation of the standard model (SM) Higgs boson decay to a pair of bottom quarks is presented. The main contribution to this result is from processes in which Higgs bosons are produced in association with a W or Z boson (VH), and are searched for in final states including 0, 1, or 2 charged leptons and two identified bottom quark jets. The results from the measurement of these processes in a data sample recorded by the CMS experiment in 2017, comprising 41.3 fb −1 of proton-proton collisions at √ s = 13 TeV, are described. When combined with previous VH measurements using data collected at √ s = 7, 8, and 13 TeV, an excess of events is observed at m H = 125 GeV with a significance of 4.8 standard deviations, where the expectation for the SM Higgs boson is 4.9. The corresponding measured signal strength is 1.01 ± 0.22. The combination of this result with searches by the CMS experiment for H → bb in other production processes yields an observed (expected) significance of 5.6 (5.5) standard deviations and a signal strength of 1.04 ± 0.20.

No abstract