Scientists on an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider see massive W particles emerging from collisions with electromagnetic fields. How can this happen?
Sarah Charley
Sarah Charley is senior writer in the Fermilab Office of Communication.
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.