Combined measurements of the production and decay rates of the Higgs boson, as well as its couplings to vector bosons and fermions, are presented. The analysis uses the LHC proton–proton collision...

The observation of the standard model (SM) Higgs boson decay to a pair of bottom quarks is presented. The main contribution to this result is from processes in which Higgs bosons are produced in association with a $W$ or $Z$ boson ($VH$), and are searched for in final states including 0, 1, or 2 charged leptons and two identified bottom quark jets. The results from the measurement of these processes in a data sample recorded by the CMS experiment in 2017, comprising $41.3{\mathrm{fb}}^{-1}$ of proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}=13\mathrm{TeV}$, are described. When combined with previous $VH$ measurements using data collected at $\sqrt{s}=7$, 8, and 13 TeV, an excess of events is observed at $m_H=125\mathrm{GeV}$ with a significance of 4.8 standard deviations, where the expectation for the SM Higgs boson is 4.9. The corresponding measured signal strength is $1.01\pm 0.22$. The combination of this result with searches by the CMS experiment for $H\to b\overline{b}$ in other production processes yields an observed (expected) significance of 5.6 (5.5) standard deviations and a signal strength of $1.04\pm 0.20$.

A measurement of the inelastic proton-proton cross section with the CMS detector at a center-of-mass energy of $$ \sqrt{s}=13 $$s=13 TeV is presented. The analysis is based on events with energy deposits in the forward calorimeters, which cover pseudorapidities of −6.6< η <−3.0 and +3.0< η <+5.2. An inelastic cross section of 68.6 ± 0.5(syst) ± 1.6(lumi) mb is obtained for events withM_X>4.1 GeV and/orM_Y>13 GeV, whereM_XandM_Yare the masses of the diffractive dissociation systems at negative and positive pseudorapidities, respectively. The results are compared with those from other experiments as well as to predictions from high-energy hadron-hadron interaction models.