Tau leptons and the decay H → τ τ at CMS

The tau lepton and its reconstruction at CMS are briefly described. This is followed by a summary of the searches for a standard model Higgs boson and neutral Higgs bosons from the minimal supersymmetric extension of the standard model decaying into pairs of tau leptons performed by the CMS Collaboration. The data samples used in these searches were collected during the first running period of the LHC and contain 4.9 fb$^{−1}$ at $\sqrt {s}=7\,\text {TeV}$ and 19.7 fb$^{−1}$ at $\sqrt {s}=8\,\text {TeV}$ .