Using charm quarks to study the Higgs boson

In the Standard Model of Particle Physics, the coupling strength of the Higgs boson to fermions, i.e. quarks and leptons, is precisely predicted and proportional to the mass of the fermions. Measuring the coupling strengths to all fermions is an important test to understand whether the Higgs boson behaves as predicted by the Standard Model or not. The charm quark is a relatively light particle, which means that the production of a Higgs boson through charm quarks happens only very rarely. We have recently published this analysis in JHEP. More details on the analysis can be found on the CMS public website.