Since its discovery in 2012 the Higgs boson particle has opened new possibilities to further improve our understanding of the Standard Model physics landscape.
Precise characterisation of its production and its properties could be used to indirectly probe for new physics effects and, at the same time, the decay of new particles could directly lead to signatures with a SM-like Higgs boson in the final state.
The decay of the Higgs boson into a b-quark pair has, in this respect, a key role; while experimentally very challenging, the large branching ratio makes it the largest contributor to the total width of the Higgs boson and, thanks to the large rate, provides the best chance to see evidence for new phenomena that lead to deviations at high energy regime.
The ATLAS collaboration achieved an important milestone by obtaining the evidence for the H->bb decay in the associated production of the Higgs boson and a vector boson using Run2 data at 13 TeV.
This seminar will mainly focus on this recent result discussing the experimental challenges that have been faced to extract the signal from a very large background. In addition, key examples of how H->bb signature could be used for directly searching for new physics effects will be given.
