Phys. Rev. Lett. 120, 231801 (2018)

It has been six years since the final elementary particle of the standard model, the Higgs boson, was first detected at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. Nevertheless, not all its properties have been established — meaning that our understanding of the fundamental laws of nature is still incomplete. One of the obstacles is the insufficient size of the datasets that can be used to derive the coupling between Higgs bosons and other elementary particles.

Now the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider has overcome this problem, and provided the most definitive measurement to date of the interaction strength between the Higgs boson and the top quark — the heaviest known elementary particle. To acquire the necessary precision, they combined data collected by the CMS detector in 2011, 2012 and 2016 involving searches for the Higgs boson produced in association with top quark–antiquark pairs, and applied sophisticated analysis methods to extract signals in the presence of challenging backgrounds.