Evidence for Higgs Boson Decays to a Pair of τ-Leptons

After the discovery of a Higgs boson in the \gamma\gamma, ZZ^{*} and WW^{*} final states in 2012 the search for leptonic decay modes plays a crucial role in the identification of this particle as the Standard Model Higgs boson. Tau leptons, as the heaviest charged leptons, do contribute significantly to the decay width of a Higgs boson of mass $m_H = 125.5$ GeV. Recent results on the search for Higgs boson decays to the \tau\tau final state with the ATLAS detector are presented based on 21 fb^{-1} proton-proton collision data collected at $\sqrt{s}=8$ TeV. To effectively suppress the high rate $Z\rightarrow \tau\tau$ background the analysis exploits the distinct event topology of Higgs bosons produced via Vector-Boson-Fusion. Based on multivariate classifiers the analysis offers a significant increase in sensitivity compared to results presented previously.