![]() Q: What more have scientists learned of the Higgs boson since the particle’s detection?Ī: At the time of the discovery, something interesting happened I did not really expect. The scientific process of the discovery was very well-designed and executed, and I think it can serve as a blueprint for how people should do such searches. The room was hot and filled with electricity. It was a very exciting moment for all of us. Another student of mine who was working on this analysis, Mingming Yang PhD ’15, presented the results of that search to the Collaboration at CERN that following afternoon. And they were the first in CMS to have that moment of seeing that was there. They were working until 2 in the morning, when they finally pushed a button to see what it looks like. One of my students, Joshua Bendavid PhD ’13, was leading that analysis, and the night before the meeting, only he and another person on the team were allowed to unblind the data. The most significant analysis turned out to be the two-photon analysis. And about two weeks before the scheduled presentations on July 4 where we eventually announced the discovery, there was a meeting on June 15 to show the analysis with its results to the collaboration. Then, of course, there had to be the moment where we unblind the data and really look to see, is the Higgs there or not. ![]() This allowed the analyzers to focus on the technical aspects, making sure everything was correct without having to worry about being influenced by what they saw. So, we made that decision together in the coordination group and said, we are going to get rid of this bias by doing what people refer to as a “blind” analysis. Because it’s dangerous as a scientist to say, “I know the solution,” which can influence the result unconsciously. We still wanted to improve our searches, and so we decided, which I felt was one of the most important decisions we took, that we had to remove the bias - that is, remove our knowledge about where the signal could appear. It was clear to everybody that we were entering the critical phase of a potential discovery. Q: Looking back, what do you remember as the key moments leading up to the Higgs boson’s discovery?Ī: I remember that by the end of 2011, we had taken a significant amount of data, and there were some first hints that there could be something, but nothing that was conclusive enough. More than 50 MIT physicists and students contributed to the CMS experiment, including Christoph Paus, professor of physics, who was one of the experiment’s two lead investigators to organize the search for the Higgs boson.Īs the LHC prepares to start back up on July 5 with “Run 3,” MIT News spoke with Paus about what physicists have learned about the Higgs particle in the last 10 years, and what they hope to discover with this next deluge of particle data. The discovery was revealed within the CMS collaboration, including over 3,000 scientists, on June 15, and ATLAS and CMS announced their respective observations to the world on July 4. ![]() Specifically, the teams observed signs that a new particle had been created and then decayed to two photons, two Z bosons or two W bosons, and that this new particle was likely the Higgs boson. In analyzing the products of countless proton-on-proton collisions, scientists registered a Higgs-like signal in the accelerator’s two independent detectors, ATLAS and CMS (the Compact Muon Solenoid). The LHC is engineered to smash together billions upon billions of protons for the chance at producing the Higgs boson and other particles that are predicted to have been created in the early universe. In early summer of 2012, signs of the Higgs particle were detected in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest particle accelerator, which is operated by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The elusive particle was the last missing piece in the Standard Model of particle physics, which is our most complete model of the universe. This July 4 marks 10 years since the discovery of the Higgs boson, the long-sought particle that imparts mass to all elementary particles.
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