Particle physicists have made a groundbreaking discovery by detecting a new decay of the Higgs boson, which suggests a potential deviation from the Standard Model and the existence of new physics. The results have been documented in the Physical Review Letters journal.
While many characteristics of the Higgs boson have aligned with the Standard Model’s predictions, there was one unexplored decay mode involving the production of a photon and a Z boson. These particles play a crucial role in conveying the weak force.
Researchers from CERN’s ATLAS and CMS collaborations utilized data from proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to investigate this unique Z+photon Higgs decay. The LHC, located near Geneva, Switzerland, is a high-energy particle accelerator that facilitates collisions between protons at incredibly high speeds.
The collision energy during this experiment was 13 trillion electron-volts, just below the LHC’s maximum capacity. To put this into perspective, it’s equivalent to the kinetic energy of an average mosquito or a grain of salt traveling at one meter per second.
2024-01-25 17:41:03
Source from phys.org