HEP-Astro Seminar | Mission Impossible? Probing the Higgs boson-charm quark coupling with the CMS Experiment

How strongly the Higgs boson couples to second-generation quarks remains a central open question for testing the Standard Model’s flavor structure. I will present the CMS program targeting the Higgs boson-charm quark Yukawa coupling via Higgs decays to a pair of charm quarks. I will focus on a new search in the until-recently unexplored production mode where the Higgs boson is produced in association with a top-quark pair, and discuss complementary searches in associated production with W or Z bosons. The key enabling tools in these searches are cutting-edge jet-flavor identification algorithms and novel analysis strategies that exploit event-level correlations, both of which are powered by state-of-the-art deep learning techniques. I will outline prospects at the HL-LHC and close with opportunities at future Higgs factories.