SWITZERLAND: ATLAS and CMS have published the most thorough investigations of the Higgs Boson’s characteristics to date.
The partnerships have studied the singular particle in unprecedented depth using the most extensive samples of proton-proton collision data acquired as far by the experiments.
Today, precisely 10 years after announcing the discovery of the Higgs boson (commonly known as God’s particle), the international ATLAS and CMS collaborations at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) present the findings of their most thorough examinations of this peculiar particle’s characteristics to date.
The independent research, which is presented in two papers that were just published in Nature, demonstrates that the particle’s characteristics are strikingly comparable with the Higgs boson qualities anticipated by the Standard Model of particle physics.
The investigations also demonstrate how the particle is becoming a potent tool for searching for the novel, undiscovered phenomena that, if discovered, can help explain some of physics’ greatest mysteries, such as the make-up of the enigmatic dark matter that exists in the cosmos.
Within a range of uncertainties that are based, among other things, on the abundance of a particular process, all of the data are strikingly compatible with the predictions of the Standard Model. An uncertainty of 6% is attained for the Higgs boson’s interaction strength with the weak force carriers.
Comparatively, a similar analysis using the whole Run 1 data sets produced uncertainty for that interaction strength of 15%.
“After just ten years of Higgs boson exploration at the LHC, the ATLAS and CMS experiments have provided a detailed map of its interactions with force carriers and matter particles,” says ATLAS spokesperson Andreas Hoecker.
“The Higgs sector is directly connected with very profound questions related to the evolution of the early universe and its stability, as well as to the striking mass pattern of matter particles. The Higgs boson discovery has sparked an exciting, deep, and broad experimental effort that will extend throughout the full LHC program.”
“Sketching such a portrait of the Higgs boson this early on was unthinkable before the LHC started operating,” says CMS spokesperson Luca Malgeri.
“The reasons for this achievement are manifold and include the exceptional performances of the LHC and the ATLAS and CMS detectors, and the ingenious data analysis techniques employed.”
Stringent restrictions on the Higgs boson’s interaction with itself as well as on novel, unexplored phenomena outside the scope of the Standard Model, including the disintegration of the Higgs boson into hypothetical dark matter particles, are among the additional new findings of the new combination analysis.
Data from the LHC’s Run 3, which begins tomorrow at a new high-energy frontier, as well as from the collider’s significant upgrade, the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC), starting in 2029, will be used by ATLAS and CMS to continue elucidating the nature of the Higgs boson.
The collaborations expect to observe some of the Higgs boson’s interactions with the lighter matter particles and to obtain the first meaningful evidence of the boson’s interaction with itself.
With about 18 million Higgs bosons projected to be produced in each experiment in Run 3 and about 180 million in the HL-runs, LHC’s collaborations expect to not only significantly reduce the measurement uncertainties of the Higgs boson’s interactions determined so far.
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