Standard Model

From Science News, August 15, 2022: W bosons are particles that transmit the weak force, which is responsible for certain types of radioactive decay. Last April, Fermilab researchers reported the W boson was more massive than predicted, hinting that something may be amiss with the standard model. Now a team of scientists with ATLAS at the LHC are reporting rare boson triplets which continues to test the standard model for any cracks.

In new papers by the CMS and ATLAS Collaborations, physicists detail high-precision results from their latest Higgs boson studies.

Scientists have learned a lot about the Higgs boson in the decade since they discovered it. But intriguing questions remain.

From The Big Think, June 29, 2022: Fermilab’s Don Lincoln highlights the 10 year anniversary of the Higgs boson, what we have learned in the past decade and what the next ten years of research and discovery may bring.

The 2013 documentary Particle Fever follows physicists from the start-up of the LHC through the discovery of the Higgs boson. Where are those physicists now?

The discovery of the Higgs boson inspired young people around the world to pursue a career in science and technology.

From NBC News, June 14, 2022: The faster and stronger LHC at CERN, scheduled to restart this summer, is stirring up renewed excitement in the discovery of particles that make up dark matter. While the LHC has been dormant for ten years, it has received upgrades while other accelerators like Fermilab’s Tevatron have made discoveries that point to possible “new physics.”

From PBS Space Time, May 25, 2022: Fermilab scientists spent almost a decade recording collisions in the Tevatron collider and another ten years analyzing data finding the W boson’s mass seems to be 0.01 percent heavier than expected. Now, understanding why the particle has mass puts the current Standard Model to the test.

From MSN (Spain), May 26, 2022: A series of precise measurements of well-known ordinary particles and processes have threatened to shake our understanding of physics from the Muon g-2 and W boson Fermilab announcements . Now the LHC is preparing to operate at a higher energy level and intensity than ever before, there is a chance that new particles are produced through even rarer processes or are hidden under backgrounds that we have not yet unearthed.

The CDF experiment at Fermilab measured the mass of the W boson and came up with an answer that no one expected.