The discovery of the Higgs boson

Transcript for video 1.3

Collisions, Higgs decays and the discovery plot

Dr Christos Leonidopolous
My name is Christos Leonidopoulos. I'm a lecturer and a chancellor's fellow of the University of Edinburgh. I'll talk to about the experimental evidence that establishes this standard model, in particular, the experimental search for the Higgs, starting from the LEP, the Tevatron, finally, to the LHC. What does it really mean that we have discovered a Higgs boson? What does a Higgs boson look like? Do we actually see the Higgs appear in front of her eyes? Not exactly. There are several obstacles that make the experimental observation of the Higgs boson a very difficult problem. First of all, producing the Higgs is not something that is easily done. We do this by colliding proton beams at the LHC in Geneva at very high energies. But we don't produce a Higgs every time there's a collision. Why not? This cannot be explained with classical physics. Quantum mechanics introduces the notion of non-deterministic behaviour in the interactions between particles. And it even allows us to calculate the probability for creating a new particle. The probability for creating a Higgs at the LHC is about once for every billion collisions. So producing the Higgs is not something that happens very often. To make things worse, every time the Higgs is produced, it vanishes right away by decaying to other particles. Right away means 10 to the minus 22 seconds, or a tenth of a thousandth of a billionth of a billionth of a second, a very short time. So we never actually get to see the Higgs in front of our eyes. The best we can hope for is to observe the fragments of the decayed products inside the detector and try to make sense of them. Let's see how this happens. Protons travel inside this beam pipe. They are moving extremely fast, basically at the speed of light. This is an artist representation of a proton containing three quarks, moving towards a head-on collision with another proton. We are obviously in slow motion here.

Our proton is approaching the detector. And if everything goes well, it should smash against another proton. You see the two protons coming from both sides. And they are synchronised to collide inside the heart of the detector. When you have a powerful collision like this, you expect fragments to come out in all directions and your detector to be able to record these signals. And it is by putting these decayed products together that you hope to reconstruct what happened at the collision time and understand if they look consistent with a decay of a new particle. This is much better explained by looking at the distribution of the reconstructed mass of the decayed product as a function of time. This particular plot is made when we combine two photons and examine if they are consistent with a decay of a Higgs particle. You can see that, as we add data, the distribution grows in size. Most of this is the background indicated by the blue curve. If this is a Higgs, it should appear as an extra peak located at a given value, the mass of the Higgs. It is very difficult to find such a peak on top of a large background. One thing that we do is to make another plot with the average background subtracted. And you can see this at the bottom. As we add more data, you see small upward and downward fluctuations in several places. But these go away after a while. Everywhere except for around 125 GeV, this peak does not go away. It looks like a new particle. This is a similar plot from what we call a different decay channel in which the reconstructed mass is calculated by combining four electrons together. This channel has a much more complex background, indicated with the red and the purple colours. It is almost impossible to spot the Higgs, unless you look at the bottom background subtracted plot. And again, not only can you see a clear peak, but it's at the same place that it was in the two-photon plot shown before, around 125 GeV. Two different channels, two clear peaks at the same place, 125 GeV, which is the mass of the Higgs.

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