This analysis supports – at the 95% confidence level – that the muons interact with the Higgs boson, and the measured strength of the interaction is in agreement with the Standard Model prediction. The new analysis that Berkeley Lab researchers contributed to is based on data collected by the ATLAS detector from 2015 to 2018. The new explorations are intended to help physicists test whether the properties of the Higgs boson agree with the Standard Model’s predictions, or point toward theories beyond the Standard Model.Ĭonfirming that the Higgs boson interacts with muons, as expected, is also vital in considering the physics potential of a new type of particle collider that collides muons. The unwanted background that researchers had to sort through contributed to about 99.9% of the data, while the actual signal amounted to about 0.1%, Yang noted, or about 1,000 candidate events in which the Higgs boson appeared to decay into a pair of muons. “There was a very tiny signal sitting on a large background,” Yang said. Hongtao Yang, a Chamberlain Fellow in Berkeley Lab’s Physics Division, said the analysis was complicated by a large amount of background signals, or “noise,” in the data that had to be disentangled from the actual signal that researchers were seeking: the Higgs boson’s decay into a pair of muons. The analysis provides new insight for the origin of mass in particles that make up ordinary matter. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and supercomputer calculations at Berkeley Lab’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), strongly supports the hypothesis that the Higgs boson interacts with muons, which are heavier siblings of electrons and the lightest particles yet to reveal evidence for these interactions. Because interactions with the Higgs field are responsible for giving other elementary particles their masses, physicists are very keen to measure how strongly the Higgs boson interacts with other particles.Īnd now a new analysis, featuring important contributions by scientists at the U.S. The Higgs particle plays a central role in the Standard Model of particle physics, which details the properties of the subatomic particles that make up our universe. Since the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 based on data from the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), scientists have been gathering new data on the Higgs particle and its associated Higgs field to understand how – and whether – it interacts with specific types of other particles. ![]() ![]() The muons appear as red tracks in this rendering. A display of a candidate Higgs boson event at CERN’s ATLAS experiment in which a Higgs boson decays into two muons.
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