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With the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the world’s most powerful particle collider, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) based at CERN, the last missing piece of the Standard Model (SM) of Particle Physics was very likely to have been found. The Higgs boson plays a unique role in all of physics by “giving the masses” to all the known elementary particles, including itself. Ironically the mass of the Higgs boson itself is not predicted by the SM and we must depend on experiments to measure it. Once the mass is known all other properties of the Higgs boson such as its decay width, couplings to other particles, the cross-sections of its production modes, etc are predicted by the SM. For over a decade since this discovery, both the ATLAS and the CMS experiments have laid out a comprehensive strategy to measure all the properties of the Higgs boson as precisely as possible to verify if these are indeed as per the SM predictions. Any hint of a deviation would be evidence of potential new physics beyond the SM.
In this colloquium I will traverse the journey we have followed in CMS over three generations of a selection of these measurements, the tools we have developed in the process and what we have learned about this mysterious particle. As we stand at the cross-roads of the last years of LHC and look forward to the beginning of the High Luminosity LHC towards the close of this decade I will give a glimpse of where we hope to be by the close of the next decade.
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