We constrain the total Higgs boson width, $\Gamma_{\mathrm{H}}$, using off-shell production and decay to four leptons, $4\ell$, or two leptons plus two neutrinos, $2\ell 2\nu$, with $\ell = \mathrm{e},\mu$. The analysis is based on the data collected in 2012 by the CMS experiment at the LHC, corresponding to an integrated luminosity ${\cal L} = 19.7 \mathrm{fb^{-1}}$ at a center-of-mass energy \surd s = 8 \, {\rm TeV}. The $4\ell$ analysis uses the ZZ invariant mass distribution as well as a matrix element likelihood discriminant to separate the ZZ components originating from gluon- and quark-initiated processes. The $2\ell 2\nu$ analysis relies on the transverse mass or missing transverse energy distributions in jet categories. An unbinned maximum-likelihood fit of the above distributions, combined with the $4\ell$ measurement near the resonance peak, leads to an upper limit on the Higgs boson width of $\Gamma_{\mathrm{H}} < 4.2 \times \Gamma_{\mathrm{H}}^{\mathrm{SM}}$ at the 95\% confidence level, assuming \Gamma_{\mathrm{H}}^{\mathrm{SM}} = 4.15 \, {\rm MeV}. This result considerably improves over previous experimental constraints from the measurement near the resonance peak.

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