"The large data samples provided by the LHC, the exceptional performance of the ATLAS and CMS detectors, and new analysis techniques have allowed both collaborations to extend the sensitivity of their Higgs-boson measurements beyond what was thought possible when the experiments were designed," says ATLAS spokesperson Andreas Hoecker. These are just a few of the concrete results of ten years of exploration of the Higgs boson at the world's largest and most powerful collider-the only place in the world where this unique particle can be produced and studied in detail. Moreover, together with the mass of the heaviest known elementary particle, the top quark, and other parameters, the Higgs boson's mass may determine the stability of the universe's vacuum. The mass of the Higgs boson is a fundamental constant of nature that is not predicted by the Standard Model. These observations confirmed the existence of an interaction, or force, called the Yukawa interaction, which is part of the Standard Model but is unlike all other forces in the Standard Model: it is mediated by the Higgs boson, and its strength is not quantized, that is, it doesn't come in multiples of a certain unit.ĪTLAS and CMS measured the Higgs boson's mass to be 125 billion electronvolts (GeV), with an impressive precision of almost one per mil. They did so by observing, in the case of the top quark, the Higgs boson being produced together with pairs of top quarks, and in the cases of the bottom quark and tau lepton, the boson's decay into pairs of bottom quarks and tau leptons respectively. The experiments have also demonstrated that the top quark, bottom quark and tau lepton-which are the heaviest fermions-obtain their mass from their interactions with the Higgs field, again as predicted by the Standard Model. The strength of these interactions explains the short range of the weak force, which is responsible for a form of radioactivity and initiates the nuclear fusion reaction that powers the Sun. By contrast, all other known elementary particles have spin: the matter particles, such as the 'up' and 'down' quarks that form protons and neutrons, and the force-carrying particles, such as the W and Z bosons.īy observing the Higgs bosons being produced from and decaying into pairs of W or Z bosons, ATLAS and CMS confirmed that these gain their mass through their interactions with the Higgs field, as predicted by the Standard Model. By using data from the disintegration, or 'decay', of the new particle into two photons, the carriers of the electromagnetic force, theĮxperiments have demonstrated that the new particle has no intrinsic angular momentum, or quantum spin-exactly like the Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model. But was it actually that long-sought-after particle? As soon as the discovery had been made, ATLAS and CMS set out to investigate in detail whether the properties of the particle they had discovered truly matched those predicted by the Standard Model. The new particle discovered by the international ATLAS and CMS collaborations in 2012 appeared very much like the Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model. Credit: (c) 2022 CERN The new journey so far
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