Probing the Charm-Higgs Yukawa at the LHC.

The discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 crowned decades of
research into building and verifying a theoretical framework, the
Standard Model, that encompasses all current knowledge in particle
physics. The crucial role of the Higgs boson in the acquisition of
mass by fundamental particles has now been established. At the
same time, its very existence has opened up new profound
questions, for example about the mystery of the observed pattern of
masses. It is generally believed that there are new physics
phenomena waiting to be discovered to help answer these open
questions. However, our exploration has only few clear indications as
to where to look for that new knowledge. The Higgs sector itself is
the most concrete avenue to verify the Standard Model and to unlock
a window to new physics. In the LHC Run-2 data, we got a glimpse
of how the Higgs boson connects to the heavy top and bottom
quarks. The upcoming Run-3 will provide significant access for the
first time to the charm-Higgs Yukawa coupling, i.e. the next quark in
the mass pattern. This project aims to develop and perform a novel
measurement of this coupling using all LHC data collected by the
CMS experiment. In view of expanding the search horizon for new
physics, the methodology will optimally break the degeneracy with
the related measurements of the top- and bottom-Higgs Yukawa
couplings and the analysis will be embedded in an Effective Field
Theory to shed light on the widest variety of new physics models.