Imagine a particle so elusive, so rare, that it's difficult even to catch a glimpse of it. That's the challenge researchers face when they try to study the Higgs boson, a fundamental particle—also ...

Display of a candidate event for the production of two W+ bosons via vector-boson scattering, followed by their decay into two muons and two muon neutrinos. The muons are represented by the red lines ...

Using this technique, the researchers calculated that the lifetime of the Higgs boson is 210 yoctoseconds – that’s in the realm of septillionths of a second, or a decimal point followed by 22 zeroes.

For the first time, physicists have a statistically significant measurement of the joint polarization of W and Z bosons. Luka Selem says he was always a curious kid. Growing up in France, he was given ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. The Universe is out there, waiting for you to discover it. It's now just over five years since the two major collaborations at the ...

In a seminar held at CERN [1] today, the ATLAS [2] and CMS [3] experiments presented the status of their searches for the Standard Model Higgs boson. Their results are based on the analysis of ...

Few scientists have come into as much fame in recent years as British theoretical physicist Peter Higgs, the namesake of the boson that was discovered in 2012, who died on 8 April, aged 94. Peter ...

To review, in Part 1, I talked about what happens when protons collide in CERN’s LHC: a bunch of stuff comes out that’s measured by detectors. In Part 2, we described the stuff that comes out: ...

The big day Fabiola Gianotti (foreground, wearing red top) leads the applause in the packed CERN auditorium on 4 July 2012. (Courtesy: CERN) As I rushed to the tram stop, I noticed the queue that had ...

In Part 5, electrons, positrons, photons, and hadrons are all measured, accounted for, and absorbed within the central detectors leaving muons and neutrinos and, possibly, something heretofore never ...