This thesis describes the stand-alone discovery and measurement of the Higgs boson in its decays to two W bosons using the Run-I ATLAS dataset. This is the most precise measurement of gluon-fusion Higgs boson production and is among the most significant results attained at the LHC. The thesis provides an exceptionally clear exposition on a complicated analysis performed by a large team of researchers. Aspects of the analysis performed by the author are explained in detail; these include new methods for evaluating uncertainties on the jet binning used in the analysis and for estimating the background due to associated production of a W boson and an off-shell photon. The thesis also describes a measurement of the WW cross section, an essential background to Higgs boson production. The primary motivation of the LHC was to prove or disprove the existence of the Higgs boson. In 2012, CERN announced this discovery and the resultant ATLAS publication contained three decay channels: gg, ZZ, and WW.

In this study, a search is reported for Higgs boson decay to ?+?- using data with an integrated luminosity of 24.8 fb-1 collected with the ATLAS detector in pp collisions at √s = 7 and 8 TeV at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. The observed dimuon invariant mass distribution is consistent with the Standard Model background-only hypothesis in the 120–150 GeV search range. For a Higgs boson with a mass of 125.5 GeV, the observed (expected) upper limit at the 95% confidence level is 7.0 (7.2) times the Standard Model expectation. This corresponds to an upper limit on the branching ratio BR(H→?+?-) of 1.5×10-3.

This thesis presents innovative contributions to the CMS experiment in the new trigger system for the restart of the LHC collisions in Run II, as well as original analysis methods and important results that led to official publications of the Collaboration. The author's novel reconstruction algorithms, deployed on the Field-Programmable Gate Arrays of the new CMS trigger architecture, have brought a gain of over a factor 2 in efficiency for the identification of tau leptons, with a very significant impact on important H boson measurements, such as its decays to tau lepton pairs and the search for H boson pair production. He also describes a novel analysis of HH → bb tautau, a high priority physics topic in a difficult channel. The original strategy, optimisation of event categories, and the control of the background have made the result one of the most sensitive concerning the self-coupling of the Higgs boson among all possible channels at the LHC.

This dissertation presents a search for the 125 GeV Standard Model Higgs boson in the opposite-sign dimuon decay channel. The search is performed in 35.92 fb-1 of proton-proton collision data taken at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV with the CMS detector at the LHC. Results are found by combining several topological categories. The resulting 95% confidence level upper limit on [sigma]/[sigma] subcript [SM H→ [mu]+[mu]-] is 2.41 × SM expected and 2.79 × SM observed.

This Thesis describes the first measurement of, and constraints on, Higgs boson production in the vector boson fusion mode, where the Higgs decays to b quarks (the most common decay channel), at the LHC. The vector boson fusion mode, in which the Higgs is produced simultaneously with a pair of quark jets, provides an unparalleled opportunity to study the detailed properties of the Higgs, including the possibility of parity and CP violation, as well as its couplings and mass. It thus opens up this new field of study for precision investigation as the LHC increases in energy and intensity, leading the way to this new and exciting arena of precision Higgs research.