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Researchers Find Evidence of How Higgs Particle Imparts Mass
brindafella (702231) writes Physicists at CERN's Large Hadron Colider (LHC) ATLAS experiment have been looking through their data, and have found enough of the extremely rare "W boson" (proton-proton) collisions that they can now declare their results: They have found how the Higgs imparts mass to other particles. From the article: "'Only about one in 100 trillion proton-proton collisions would produce one of these events,' said Marc-André Pleier, a physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory who played a leadership role in the analysis of this result for the ATLAS collaboration. 'You need to observe many [collisions] to see if the production rate is above or on par with predictions,' Pleier said. 'We looked through billions of proton-proton collisions produced at the LHC for a signature of these events—decay products that allow us to infer like Sherlock Holmes what happened in the event.' The analysis efforts started two years ago and were carried out in particular by groups from Brookhaven, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of Michigan, and Technische Universität Dresden, Germany."
Here's a pre-print of the paper.
Summary and title is a bit misleading. I was eager to see what they would say about how this 'higgs boson' infers mass to other particles, but they never say anything about that, they just talk about how they found this data and how they produced the results. Maybe I missed something?
Indeed. Only a small fraction of the collision events are kept, otherwise the amount of data would be overwhelming.
From http://www.lhc-closer.es/1/3/13/0:
In particle physics, a trigger is a system that uses simple criteria to rapidly decide which events in a particle detector to keep when only a small fraction of the total can be recorded. Trigger systems are necessary due to real-world limitations in data storage capacity and rates. Since experiments are typically searching for "interesting" events (such as decays of rare particles) that occur at a relatively low rate, trigger systems are used to identify the events that should be recorded for later analysis. Current accelerators have event rates greater than 1 MHz and trigger rates that can be below 10 Hz.