Higgs

When streams of ultra-fast protons collide, a Higgs boson might pop into existence for the briefest instant before decaying into lighter particles.In that moment, physicists can work backwards to estimate the mass of what could be the most important and yet most elusive particle in the Standard Model.Having crunched the numbers on a mind-boggling number of proton collisions using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), physicists now have the most precise figure yet for this all-important property.First reported in July, the…

Candidate Higgs boson decays into two photons in the ATLAS experiment. Credit: CERNNew result from the ATLAS experiment at <span class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>CERN</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>Established in 1954 and headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, CERN is a European research organization that operates the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Its full name is the…

A refined hunt for the extremely rare transformation of the Higgs boson has delivered results, providing the first evidence of a process that could hint at unknown particles.Reconciling the results of several years' worth of proton crashes inside two different detectors at the European Organization for Nuclear Research's (CERN) Large Hadron Collider (LHC), physicists bumped up the statistical precision of the rate at which the famous 'mass-giving' particle decayed into a photon and a Z boson.The results, shared at the…

An event display from the CMS experiment, used in a search for additional heavy Higgs bosons. Credit: CERNWhere does the Higgs boson come from?The <span class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>CERN</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>Established in 1954 and headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, CERN is a European research organization that operates the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the largest particle physics laboratory in the…

It is a curious fact that the Beatles’ debut single, Love Me Do, and the first James Bond film, Dr No, were both released on Friday 5 October 1962. No one could have predicted that we would still be thrilled by the band’s music six decades later, or that the film franchise would still be going strong. John Higgs, however, had the intriguing idea of exploring their creation, development and afterlives in parallel.Though he inevitably covers some well-trodden territory, much of the detail is poignant and entertaining. In…

Exactly 10 years ago, Peter Higgs learned that the subatomic particle named after him had finally been found. He was in Sicily, enjoying lunch in a restaurant. Outside, the stone streets of Erice burned in the midday sun; inside, a Dutch film crew was making a documentary about the boson he had described in a two-page research paper nearly half a century earlier. With Higgs was Alan Walker, another physicist who, since retirement, had served as a kind of personal assistant.Walker stepped away from the table to take a…

This month marks the 10th anniversary of the discovery of the Higgs boson, a true “Holy Grail” of science that had eluded detection for almost 50 years. But what exactly is this particle, and why is it so important? What has it taught us in the decade since its discovery – and more importantly, what could it teach us in the next decade?The Standard Model of particle physics predicts that the universe is made up of 12 elementary matter particles, four force carriers and one final particle that holds it all together – the…

Event recorded with the CMS detector in 2012 at a proton-proton center of mass energy of 8 TeV. The event shows characteristics expected from the decay of the SM Higgs boson to a pair of photons (dashed yellow lines and green towers). Credit: CERNChristoph Paus, the <span class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>MIT</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>MIT is an acronym for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is a…

The LZ central detector in the clean room at Sanford Underground Research Facility. Photo: Matthew Kapust, Sanford Underground Research FacilityThe LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment team has announced the results from its first scientific run today; the experiment is the world’s most sensitive dark matter detector, and though it did not find any dark matter in this first round, the team confirmed that the experiment is working as expected.The LZ experiment detector is made up nested tanks of liquid xenon, each 1.5 meters tall…

Imagine that you have just arrived on a planet in another solar system. Suddenly, five minutes after you landed, you spot an alien life-form. This is an amazing discovery! You may well spend decades trying to understand this exotic being, probing its properties and investigating how it came to be there. At the same time, you expect that there may be other fascinating creatures around, maybe even more intriguing than the first and possibly much harder to get a glimpse of. This is how it feels for particle physicists as we…