Title: Probing the Higgs Boson Coupling to Bottom Quarks at the Tevatron

Abstract:

We present the results of direct searches for the associated production of the standard model Higgs boson with a W or Z boson at the Tevatron in final states with bottom quarks. Results are derived from the complete Tevatron Run II dataset, with a measured integrated luminosity of 10/fb of proton-antiproton data. The searches are performed for assumed Higgs masses between 90 and 150 GeV. Employing several improved techniques, these are currently the most sensitive searches for probing the Higgs coupling to the bottom quarks. We observe an excess of events in the data compared with the background predictions, which is most significant in the mass range between 120 and 135 GeV/c^2, consistent with the Higgs-like particle recently observed by ATLAS and CMS. The largest local significance is 3.3 standard deviations, corresponding to a global significance of 3.1 standard deviations. We interpret this as evidence for the presence of a new particle consistent with the standard model Higgs boson that is produced in association with a weak vector boson and decays to a b-bbar quark pairs.