Higgs boson – Cosmic Log

America’s particle physics plan gets a status update

RALEIGH, N.C. — Particle physicist Hitoshi Murayama admits that he used to worry about being known as the “most hated man” in his field of science. But the good news is that now he can joke about it.

Last year, the Berkeley professor chaired the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel, or P5, which drew up a list of multimillion-dollar physics experiments that should move ahead over the next 10 years. The list focused on phenomena ranging from subatomic smash-ups to cosmic inflation. At the same time, the panel also had to decide which projects would have to be left behind for budgetary reasons, which could have turned Murayama into the Dr. No of physics.

Although Murayama has some regrets about the projects that were put off, he’s satisfied with how the process turned out. Now he’s just hoping that the federal government will follow through on the P5’s top priorities.

What happens to Higgs bosons? Here’s a clue

Higgs boson decay — A diagram shows a proton-proton collision in the Large Hadron Collider’s ATLAS detector that produced a Higgs boson, which quickly decayed into two bottom quarks (bb, shown as blue cones). The collision also produced a W boson that decayed into a muon (μ) and a neutrino (ν). (ATLAS / CERN Graphic)

It’s been six years since physicists at Europe’s Large Hadron Collider announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, but they’re just now confirming what most of the mysterious subatomic particles do when they decay.

They’re transformed into bottom quarks, they announced today.

That’s not exactly a surprise: The mainstream theory of particle physics, known as the Standard Model, suggests that’s the most common course followed by the Higgs, which exists in the particle collider for only an instant before breaking down. About 60 percent of the Higgs bosons created in high-energy are thought to turn into a pair of bottom quarks, which is No. 2 on the mass scale for six “flavors” of quarks.

It took several years for researchers to nail down the evidence to a standard significance of 5-sigma — the same standard that applied to the Higgs boson’s discovery in 2012.

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