Particle Physics Seminar

The discovery of a particle compatible with the Standard Model (SM) Higgs boson in 2012 by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at LHC is a milestone in particle physics. In order to assess whether or not this Higgs boson belongs to the SM, it is necessary to measure its properties, in particular its coupling to the top quark (the strongest Yukawa coupling in the SM). The associated production of a Higgs boson with a pair of top quarks, ttH gives the most favorable direct access to the top quark Yukawa coupling and is accessible for the first time in LHC Run 2.
A search for the ttH production with the Higgs boson decaying into a b quark pair, ttH(bb), will be presented. It uses the 36.1 fb^-1 of data recorded by the ATLAS detector in 2015 and 2016. The main limitation to the search of ttH(bb) events is the tt+jets background and its systematic uncertainties. To achieve sufficient sensitivity, this complex analysis relies on several advanced tools to separate the leading background tt+jets from the signal, and to extract both of these processes from data (multi-variate analysis, profile likelihood fit, etc.). All these key aspects of the analysis will be discussed.
The combination of the ttH(bb) channel with the other decay modes is necessary to improve the sensitivity to the ttH production mode. This combination leads to 4.2 sigma evidence of the ttH production and will be also presented.