Nature Physics today published the strongest evidence yet that the recently discovered Higgs boson couples to fermions.

Nature Physics today published the strongest evidence yet that the recently discovered Higgs boson couples to fermions.

"This is a great result for CMS, and our understanding of mass generation" said David Colling whose team co-lead the analysis. "This result combines searches for the decay to so-called tau leptons and b-quarks - two types of fermion", he continued.

"In the Standard Model of particle physics the Higgs mechanism gives mass to all elementary particles, both bosons and fermions, so it's critical to observe decays to both types to build up the full picture", explained Gavin Davies, a co-member of CMS. Overall a signal with a significance of nearly 4σ is observed.

Monica Vazquez Acosta who presented the result to the public for the first time at CERN was understandably delighted, paying particular tribute to the major contribution of Imperial PhD students.