3 Questions: Philip Harris on first observation of long-predicted Higgs boson decay
Today, scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, have announced that, for the first time, they have observed the Higgs boson transforming into elementary particles known as bottom quarks as it decays. Physicists have predicted this to be the most common way in which most Higgs bosons should decay, but until now, it has been extremely difficult to pick out the decay’s subtle signals. The discovery is a significant step towards understanding how the Higgs boson gives mass to all the fundamental particles in the universe. The scientists made their discovery using the ATLAS and the CMS detectors, two major experiments designed to analyze the high-energy particle collisions generated by CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — the largest, most powerful particle accelerator in the world. Higgs bosons, which were first discovered in 2012, are an incredible rarity, and are produced in just one out of every billion LHC...