Only a fraction of collision events that look like they produce a Higgs boson actually produce a Higgs boson. Luckily, it doesn’t matter.
Higgs boson
From CERN, Oct. 15, 2019: A new result by the CMS Collaboration narrows down the mass of the Higgs boson to a precision of 0.1%. After reporting the observation of the Higgs boson at the CERN LHC in 2012, scientists the ATLAS and CMS collaborations have been busy understanding exactly its place within the standard model of particle physics. Any straying from expectations could be an indication of new physics.
From CERN, May 24, 2019: The CMS collaboration used a large proton–proton collision dataset, collected during the Large Hadron Collider’s second run, to search for instances in which the Higgs boson might transform, or “decay”, into a photon and a massless dark photon.
On Aug. 28, the CMS collaboration announced the observation of the Higgs-to-bb decay mode with the significance of 5 sigma. The roots of the CMS Higgs-to-bb analysis lie at the Fermilab LHC Physics Center.
From Science, Sept. 13, 2018: At a recent workshop at Fermilab, more than 100 physicists gathered to hone the conceptual tools needed for the long search for collisions that produce not just one Higgs boson, but two. Fermilab scientists Marcela Carena and Caterina Vernieri, as well as others on CMS and ATLAS, comment on the plan.
From Kane County Chronicle, Aug. 30, 2018: Fermilab scientists have played a role in the recent discovery of the Higgs boson transforming into bottom quarks as it decays. The breakthrough was described in a joint announcement from the Large Hadron Collider experiment collaborations ATLAS and CMS at CERN.
From CNET, Aug. 30, 2018: This explainer on the latest Higgs boson result from ATLAS and CMS quotes Fermilab scientist Don Lincoln.
CMS observes Higgs boson decays into bottom quarks, furthering our knowledge of how the particles that make up matter behave.
From Live Science, Aug. 28, 2018: Fermilab and CMS scientist Don Lincoln explains the latest exciting result from the Large Hadron Collider: ATLAS and CMS’s first unambiguous observation of Higgs bosons decaying into a matter-antimatter pair of bottom quarks. Surprisingly, the Higgs bosons decay most often in this way.
From GeekWire, Aug. 28, 2018: It took several years for ATLAS and CMS researchers to nail down the evidence of the Higgs decay into two b quarks to a standard significance of 5-sigma. Researchers had to sift through billions of data points from two collider runs to boost their confidence sufficiently.