Observation of t¯tH production

Abstract

The observation of Higgs boson production in association with a top quark-antiquark pair is reported, based on a combined analysis of proton-proton collision data at center-of-mass energies of ffiffiffi s p ¼ 7, 8, and 13 TeV, corresponding to integrated luminosities of up to 5.1, 19.7, and 35.9 fb−1, respectively. The data were collected with the CMS detector at the CERN LHC. The results of statistically independent searches for Higgs bosons produced in conjunction with a top quark-antiquark pair and decaying to pairs of W bosons, Z bosons, photons, τ leptons, or bottom quark jets are combined to maximize sensitivity. An excess of events is observed, with a significance of 5.2 standard deviations, over the expectation from the background-only hypothesis. The corresponding expected significance from the standard model for a Higgs boson mass of 125.09 GeV is 4.2 standard deviations. The combined best fit signal strength normalized to the standard model prediction is 1.26 þ0.31 −0.26 .