Search for Higgs Decays in the di-muon channel wth the ATLAS detector

The recently discovered Higgs boson is expected to couple to particles in proportion to their mass. At the LHC all searches so far have focussed on couplings to massive vector bosons (W or Z) or thrid generation fermions (top and bottom quarks and tau leptons). Higgs decays to second generation fermions is only possible in the muon channel since the expected backgrounds for charm and strange quarks is far too large at the LHC. Muons have an experimentally clean signature and can easily be identified. This measurement is an important analysis as it is currently the only possibility we have for measuring 2nd generation couplings of the Higgs. However, due to the small muon mass it's anticipated that the about 300 fb-1 of data are needed (i.e. all data taken up to 2022). If the couplings are larger than expected then a signal will be visible with smaller data sets and would be a clear signal of new physics.