Recently, physicists who are working on the ATLAS experiment at CERN have spotted an unusual activity within the Higgs boson. After they combined information from two runs of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), scientists were able to confirm that the Higgs boson decayed to two bottom quarks. The discovery was announced on July 9th at the 2018 International Conference on High Energy Physics from Seoul, Korea.
The first speculations upon the particle appeared in 1964, but The Higgs boson was discovered in 2012 at Large Hadron Collider. Here, high-energy proton-proton collisions are used to produce it.
Why is the Higgs boson so important?
The boson „borrowed” the name from the British physicist Peter Higgs. Also called „God’s particle”, the element is a basic member from the eponymous family. It is a part of the spontaneous breaking of symmetry mechanisms and gives mass to the other elementary particles.
We can understand why it plays play an essential part in establishing the Standard Model of particle physics. The boson appeared as a result of a symmetry-breaking event that occurred when the Universe was in its early stages. Thus, it created the Higgs field, a uniform scalar area that pervades all space.
In this context, leptons, quarks and the W and Z bosons are elementary particles which will get distinctive masses by the strength of their different couplings to this field. Furthermore, the decay channel wasn’t easily noticeable among all those particles which are produced by proton-proton collisions registered at the collider. This situation is surprising since the channel should represent almost 60% of all Higgs decays registered at the LHC.
What caused the decay
The data studied recently proves that the coupling to quarks is causing the Higgs to decay until the present value. To be more precise, the actual level is a bottom quark and an antibottom quark. Scientists say that these findings will support further research.
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