HIggs boson tagged posts

Scientists at CERN’s ATLAS experiment have uncovered compelling evidence of Higgs bosons decaying into muons, an incredibly rare event that could deepen our understanding of how particles acquire mass. They also sharpened their ability to detect the even rarer Higgs decay into a Z boson and a photon—a process that might reveal hidden physics beyond the Standard Model.

The ATLAS Collaboration finds evidence of Higgs-boson decays to muons and improves sensitivity to Higgs-boson decays to a Z boson and a photon.

Since the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, physicists have made major strides in exploring its properties...

The Higgs a Particle could have Ended the Universe by now—here’s why we’re still here

Although our universe may seem stable, having existed for a whopping 13.7 billion years, several experiments suggest that it is at risk—walking on the edge of a very dangerous cliff. And it’s all down to the instability of a single fundamental particle: the Higgs boson.

In new research by me and my colleagues, just accepted for publication in Physical Letters B, we show that some models of the early universe, those which involve objects called light primordial black holes, are unlikely to be right because they would have triggered the Higgs boson to end the cosmos by now.

The Higgs boson is responsible for the mass and interactions of all the particles we know of...

Today, exactly ten years after announcing the discovery of the Higgs boson, the international ATLAS and CMS collaborations at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) report the results of their most comprehensive studies yet of the properties of this unique particle. The independent studies, described in two papers published today in Nature, show that the particle’s properties are remarkably consistent with those of the Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics...

Sketch of dimensional reduction.
Credit: David Weir

With the help of computer simulations, particle physics researchers may be able to explain why there is more matter than antimatter in the Universe. The simulations offer a new way of examining conditions after the Big Bang, and could provide answers to some fundamental questions in particle physics.

In the Standard Model of particle physics, there is almost no difference between matter and antimatter. But there is an abundance of evidence that our observable universe is made up only of matter – if there was any antimatter, it would annihilate with nearby matter to produce very high intensity gamma radiation, which has not been observed...