Physicists
working at CERN's Large Hadron Collider have observed the decaying of
the Higgs boson into a particle called a bottom quark and its antimatter
counterpart, an antibottom quark. This elusive interaction is predicted
to comprise of 57% of the particle's decays, yet has remained elusive
until now.
A single Higgs boson particle weights about 130
protons and it only lasts for about 10-trillionths of a nanosecond
before it decays into less massive particles. When it was first
discovered almost six years, it was through the decaying into two
photons, which is predicted to occur only 9% of the time.
To
observe this interaction, the teams working on this project combined
data from two separate runs using the Large Hadron Collider. Applying
complex analysis methods to the data, they discovered the decay with a
significance exceeding 5 standard deviations.
The observation
of this process is crucial as its results could either lend support to
the Standard Model of physics or question its foundations and point to
new physics. “The experiments continue to home in on the Higgs particle,
which is
often considered a portal to new physics,” said Dr. Eckhard Elsen,
Director for Research and Computing at CERN.“The analysis methods have now been shown to reach the precision required for exploration of the full physics landscape, including hopefully new physics that so far hides so subtly.”
Read more about this fascinating story at: http://press.cern/press-releases/2018/08/long-sought-decay-higgs-boson-observed
Or read the full study papers here:
Image: The Higgs boson decaying to two bottom quarks (blue cones), in association
with a W boson decaying to a muon (red) and a neutrino. The neutrino
leaves the detector unseen, and is reconstructed through the missing
transverse energy (dashed line). Image extracted via ATLAS Collaboaration/CERN
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