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Compact Muon Solenoid
LHC, CERN

CMS-PAS-HIG-22-002
Search for the lepton flavor violating decay of a Higgs boson in the e$ \mu $ final state in proton-proton collisions at $ \sqrt{s} = $ 13 TeV
Abstract: A search for the lepton-flavor violating decay of a Higgs boson or other exotic resonances with a mass from 110-160 GeV to an $ \mathrm{e}^{\pm}\mu^{\mp} $ pair is presented. The search is performed with a proton-proton collision data set at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV collected by the CMS experiment at the LHC, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 138 fb$ ^{-1} $. No significant excess is observed for the standard model Higgs boson with a mass at around 125 GeV. The observed (expected) upper limit on the branching fraction for the standard model Higgs boson is determined to be 4.4 (4.7) $\times$ 10$^{-5} $ at 95% confidence level, the most stringent limit set thus far from direct searches. An excess of events over the expected background is observed at an electron-muon invariant mass of approximately 146 GeV with a global (local) significance of 2.8 (3.8) standard deviations.
CMS Publications
Compact Muon Solenoid
LHC, CERN