Nuclear and Particle Physics Colloquium 29

A new particle was discovered in 2012 by the CMS and ATLAS experimentsat CERN, and its properties in the diphoton and ZZ decay channels lookedcompatible with those of a Higgs boson of the standard model (SM), with amass of 125 GeV. To further assess its compatibility with the SM hypothesis,it is important to measure its Yukawa couplings to fermions, and more particularly to tau leptons. The first part of the presentation will detail the search for a SM Higgs boson decaying to tau leptons, using data collected in 2011 and 2012 by the CMS detector.

The minimal supersymmetric extension of the SM (MSSM) can address some known shortcomings of the SM, and is one of the most elegant theories of physics beyond the SM. The MSSM predicts the existence of five scalar bosons, and, in a large part of the parameter space,searching for the decay of one of the heavy neutral scalars to tau leptons is the most powerful way to uncover an MSSM scalar sector. The second part of the talk will focus on the search for a heavy neutral scalar boson of the MSSM decaying to tau leptons.

Dr. Cecile Caillol obtained her Ph.D degree under the supervision of Prof.Barbara Clerbaux in April 2016, from Universite Libre de Bruxelles. In 2015,Cecile received CMS Fundamental Scholarship Physics (FPS) Prize which supports her to be based at CERN for one year for the project “Search for an extended scalar sector using taus in the final state”. During her Ph.D period,she has made 5 preapproval or approval talks on behalf of the analysis group and presented 9 talks/posters at international conferences or workshops on behalf of CMS collaboration. She has made significant contributions to 7 publications from CMS collaboration, including 1 paper published in Nature Phys.