Sarah Charley

Scientists on experiments at the LHC are redesigning their methods and building supplemental detectors to look for new particles that might be evading them.

Scientists know the Higgs boson interacts with extremely massive particles. Now, they’re starting to study how it interacts with lighter particles as well.

What does it take to publish a scientific analysis in one of the world’s largest experiments? A huge amount of meticulous work and scrutiny goes into each paper published by CMS, a collaboration of about 3,000 scientists.

Experimentalists and theorists search for Higgs bosons escaping as dark matter.

Scientists on Large Hadron Collider experiments can learn about subatomic matter by peering into the collisions and asking: What exactly is doing the colliding? When the answer to that question involves rarely seen, massive particles, it gives scientists a unique way to study the Higgs boson. They can study rare, one-in-a-trillion heavy-boson collisions happening inside the LHC.

In this imaginative film, Symmetry writer Sarah Charley depicts a short story in which a physicist is unable to cook what he wants with the ingredients he has. It’s not easy to get the grocery while sheltering in place, so he decides to use the physics at work in the Large Hadron Collider to get what he needs.

In 2010, the Large Hadron Collider research program jumped into full swing as scientists started collecting physics data from particle collisions in the LHC for the first time. How has this gigantic, global scientific effort affected the world? Symmetry pulled together a few numbers to find out.

Only 1% of the mass of the proton comes from the Higgs field. ALICE scientists examine a process that could help explain the rest.

Only a fraction of collision events that look like they produce a Higgs boson actually produce a Higgs boson. Luckily, it doesn’t matter.

What if you want to capture an image of a process so fast that it looks blurry if the shutter is open for even a billionth of a second? This is the type of challenge scientists on experiments like CMS and ATLAS face as they study particle collisions at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. An extremely fast new detector inside the CMS detector will allow physicists to get a sharper image of particle collisions.