Large Hadron Collider Detects Evidence of a Rare Higgs Boson Process: God Particle Decaying Into a Pair of Muons

LHC CMS Detector

The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) is a general-purpose detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It has a broad physics programme ranging from studying the Standard Model (including the Higgs boson) to searching for extra dimensions and particles that could make up dark matter. The CMS detector is built around a huge solenoid magnet. This takes the form of a cylindrical coil of superconducting cable that generates a field of 4 tesla, about 100,000 times the magnetic field of the Earth. The field is confined by a steel “yoke” that forms the bulk of the detector’s 14,000-tonne weight. Credit: CERN

The ATLAS and CMS collaborations at the Large Hadron Collider have seen evidence of a new type of decay not yet observed: the Higgs boson decaying into a pair of muons.

US CMS — the United States contingent of the global CMS collaboration — played a crucial role in this result, contributing to the excellent performance of CMS detector. US CMS members have been instrumental in the design, construction, and upgrades of detector components that capture the particle tracks and help filter potential signals from the background noise: the tracker detector, the muon detectors, the muon trigger system, and the computing system. They continue to lead the successful maintenance and operations of these systems.

“US CMS is very proud to acknowledge the significant impact made by its members in deploying innovative analysis techniques, including cutting-edge AI methods, which were critical in establishing the evidence for Higgs boson decays into a muon and antimuon pair,” said Brown University physicist Meenakshi Narain, chair of the US CMS collaboration. “This is a rare process, and finding evidence for it is a vital step toward understanding the Higgs particle and the Standard Model.”

CMS is an international collaboration with members from 238 institutes across 55 countries. US CMS, hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, makes up about a third of the CMS collaboration.

“The achievement, reached significantly ahead of what was expected, relies on the excellent performance of our detector, on the large data set provided by LHC, and on advanced analysis techniques,” said Roberto Carlin, spokesperson for the CMS experimental collaboration.


The ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN have announced new results that show that the Higgs boson decays into two muons. The muon is a heavier copy of the electron, one of the elementary particles that constitute the matter content of the universe. While electrons are classified as a first-generation particle, muons belong to the second generation. The physics process of the Higgs boson decaying into muons is a rare phenomenon as only about one Higgs boson in 5,000 decays into muons. These new results have pivotal importance for fundamental physics because they indicate for the first time that the Higgs boson interacts with second-generation elementary particles.

Physicists at CERN have been studying the Higgs boson since its discovery in 2012 to probe the properties of this very special particle. The Higgs boson, produced from proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider, disintegrates – referred to as decay – almost instantaneously into other particles. One of the main methods of studying the Higgs boson’s properties is by analyzing how it decays into the various fundamental particles and the rate of disintegration.

CMS Event Display Higgs Boson Decay to Two Muons

A candidate of a Higgs boson decays into two muons as recorded by CMS. Credit: CMS collaboration, CMS collaboration, Thomas McCauley

CMS achieved evidence of this decay with 3 sigma, which means that the chance of seeing the Higgs boson decaying into a muon pair from statistical fluctuation is less than one in 700. ATLAS’ two sigma result means the chances are one in 40. The combination of both results would increase the significance well above 3 sigma and provides strong evidence for the Higgs boson decay to two muons.

“CMS is proud to have achieved this sensitivity to the decay of Higgs bosons to muons and to show the first experimental evidence for this process. The Higgs boson seems to interact also with second-generation particles in agreement with the prediction of the Standard Model, a result that will be further refined with the data we expect to collect in the next run,” says Roberto Carlin, spokesperson for the CMS experiment.

The Higgs boson is the quantum manifestation of the Higgs field, which gives mass to elementary particles it interacts with, via the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism. By measuring the rate at which the Higgs boson decays into different particles, physicists can infer the strength of their interaction with the Higgs field: the higher the rate of decay into a given particle, the stronger its interaction with the field. So far, the ATLAS and CMS experiments have observed the Higgs boson decays into different types of bosons such as W and Z, and heavier fermions such as tau leptons. The interaction with the heaviest quarks, the top and bottom, was measured in 2018. Muons are much lighter in comparison, and their interaction with the Higgs field is weaker. Interactions between the Higgs boson and muons had, therefore, not been seen at the LHC.

ATLAS Event Display Higgs Boson Decay to Two Muons

A candidate ATLAS event display of a Higgs boson decay to two muons. Credit: ATLAS collaboration

“This evidence of Higgs boson decays to second-generation matter particles complements a highly successful Run 2 Higgs physics program. The measurements of the Higgs boson’s properties have reached a new stage in precision and rare decay modes can be addressed. These achievements rely on the large LHC data set, the outstanding efficiency, and performance of the ATLAS detector, as well as the use of novel analysis techniques,” says Karl Jakobs, ATLAS spokesperson.

What makes these studies even more challenging is that, at the LHC, for every predicted Higgs boson decaying to two muons, there are thousands of muon pairs produced through other processes that mimic the expected experimental signature. The characteristic signature of the Higgs boson’s decay to muons is a small excess of events that cluster near a muon-pair mass of 125 GeV, which is the mass of the Higgs boson. Isolating the Higgs boson to muon-pair interactions is no easy feat. To do so, both experiments measure the energy, momentum and angles of muon candidates from the Higgs boson’s decay. In addition, the sensitivity of the analyses was improved through methods such as sophisticated background modeling strategies and other advanced techniques such as machine-learning algorithms. CMS combined four separate analyses, each optimized to categorize physics events with possible signals of a specific Higgs boson production mode. ATLAS divided their events into 20 categories that targeted specific Higgs boson production modes.

The results, which are so far consistent with the Standard Model predictions, used the full data set collected from the second run of the LHC. With more data to be recorded from the particle accelerator’s next run and with the High-Luminosity LHC, the ATLAS and CMS collaborations expect to reach the sensitivity (5 sigma) needed to establish the discovery of the Higgs boson decay to two muons and constrain possible theories of physics beyond the Standard Model which would affect this decay mode of the Higgs boson.

References:

“Measurement of Higgs boson decay to a pair of muons in proton-proton collisions at s√=13TeV” by CMS Collaboration, 29 July 2020, CMS Physics Analysis Summaries.
Report: CMS-PAS-HIG-19-006

“A search for the dimuon decay of the Standard Model Higgs boson with the ATLAS detector” by ATLAS Collaboration, 15 July 2020, High Energy Physics – Experiment.
DOI: 10.1016/j.physletb.2020.135980
arXiv: 2007.07830

8 Comments on "Large Hadron Collider Detects Evidence of a Rare Higgs Boson Process: God Particle Decaying Into a Pair of Muons"

  1. Steven Goldfarb | August 9, 2020 at 5:25 am | Reply

    Dear Editors,

    There is no such thing a a “God Particle.” You are referring to the Higgs boson. Please call it as such. There is no need for the media to create phrases like this. The physics is already amazing, as it is. It only generates misunderstanding during a time when our moronic leaders are already doing what they can to foment distrust. I believe you can be above that. Thank you.

    • You can also incite and excite the minds of the curious by equating science with religion. Some curious are dumb curious, in which case, what are you worried about? They’ll go back to their basement and be all, “Dude.. They found Jesus, man..! Sh*t you not. Read this thing, on like, a web page or whatever! Something legit, man, real reporters, being real legit.
      Said his name is Higgs though and can barely find his particals, or whatever, after they smash crap together in that hydrodome collider they got up in… I dunno.. Canada or something. ”

      And who TF cares about that guys loose lips?

      You get some curious, troublesome curious.. With,”How dare anyone claim to have seen the face of God in your anti creation veiw. Got something against creating something? So, artists everywhere should die? in your opinion? God is the alpha and omega and one true God of everything. If he wanted to be found in your dumb, backless, bullharkey of scientific method, then, he wouldn’t have made a covenant based purely of faith with all his sons and daughters. Simple logic refutes your so-called, “Math” and “observation”…so you can take your geology study to a professional who hasnt aready closed their minds to your slamming doors.”

      What do you say to those people’s?

      Sometimes smart curious, tear you apart curious..

      Like someone who understands God as a natural flowing of all things, seemingly self aware..he adapts observers to keep it ‘in his image’.. develops their workspace and allows the time it takes to work said space. As it requires acquiring more space in order to process and eliminate time,
      Infinitly more because, unlike our curious religious guy (also me) back at rant//76. “Eer uhh whatnot’ tells us that idea of numbers had a good discussion in history but falls short in the Sweeney Paradox… (me.. I’m sweeney.) Close your eyes and count.. Forever. Seriously, take all that vastness between your ears and imagine the numbers floating by and away like Star Wars, title screen. Forever. All of that infinite amount of thought… And it happens within a finite workspace, which is itself contained in an infinit universe for a finite amount of time. Science CoExists with this God and therefore every partical is a God partical. You can never trust numbers to tell you your course because they will never be counted well enough to offer a detailed, solid, order to measure our existence with.The only thing you Can trust, is that whoever got that money for “discovering” the world’s largest number to date.. I add 1 to that and win by my own ability to observe a continuation unmeasured until my death..( If you believe this hype about reality being subjective… And yer reading about partical physics so if not then don’t come to class anyway, dumb curious) 1. My observation is over, therefore Earth doesn’t exist as a space at all anymore, because a tree just fell in the woods and noone was there to hear it. If it’s subjective and I can measure, Now, while alive.. Then what started my observation? And if I die and nothing is left to be observed., will I have ever existed? Or to break the paradox (don’t worry you get back in there…) both.. Infinite and finite, exist and also don’t, not only at this moment but all moments. If that’s the case then we live in a realitive coexistence with a symbiotic partner and that is more amazing than “like Jesus Higgs Christ’s biggest ever discovered number…” dude…

      Get back in the box… Cuz all that being said..

      To what end? From what start.? How did a loop of everything and nothing end up existing or not for us to calculate inaccurately?

  2. Ernesto Ulloa | August 9, 2020 at 6:37 am | Reply

    True there is no God particle. In the summer of 1987 I was a student doing summer work at Fermi lab. During lunch I was seated next to Leon Lederman. He told me that his book was to be named The Godammed particle because it’s elusiveness to experimental detection. The book, according to him, was to have a lite kind of colloquial and comic tone. He also told me that his editor said that The God particle was a better because it will attract more readers.

  3. I agree with Steven Goldfarb that referring to the higgs boson as the God particle obfuscates the real physics and not only does it obfuscate real physics but it’s actually harmful to correct understanding. There is absolutely no reason to infuse “God” into the physics at all and I don’t think it clarifies or helps understanding of the higgs boson in any way to do so. Please drop this moniker.

  4. Mathew Falconer | August 9, 2020 at 3:38 pm | Reply

    A more accurate name would be the “gay particle” because it causes like to attract to like.

  5. Wait, you went from having a “candidate” for the Higgs boson to actually having the Higgs boson? Exactly when did that happen? You are forgetting a step there? Please find the Higgs boson first. Then you can run around yelling you found your “God Particle.” Otherwise you are getting ahead of yourself.

  6. I mean to say.. It generates page revenue… You educated idiots.

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