(Newswire.net — August 31, 2018) — Six years after the Higgs boson particle was discovered, it was finally observed in what way the particle “dies”, breaking into not only two but six fundamental particles known as the bottom quarks.
The discovery was presented at CERN by ATLAS and CMS Collaborations, the two largest international research groups using the CERN Accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Both teams have submitted their results for publication, and the discovery is consistent with the hypothesis that the all-pervasive quantum field of Higgs boson gives the mass to the mentioned bottom of quarks.
In fact, according to the Standard Model of Elemental Particle Physics, as many as 60 percent of the time, Higgs boson collapses precisely on a couple of quarks. These quarks are the second most common among six types, which scientists christened with witty names (Up, Down, Charm, Stretching, Top, Bot). These particles make up all known matter.
The bottom quark was discovered in 1977 by the Fermilab E288 experiment team led by Leon M. Lederman, when collisions produced bottomonium. On its discovery, there were efforts to name the bottom quark “beauty”, but “bottom” became the predominant usage, by analogy of “top” and “bottom” to “up” and “down”.
Checking the hypothesis that Higgs breaks up only on two quarks is crucial for modern physics, because the results can either totally undermine current theories and point to a new branch of physics, or verify the Standard Model, which is based on the idea that the Higgs field “gives” mass to quarks and other elementary particles.
However, the detection of a pattern to which the Higgs boson breaks down is not at all easy, as has been shown during the six years of research after the discovery of Higgs. The reason for such difficulties is technically – the collapse of Higgs bosons into quarks will emerge only with powerful collisions of accelerated proton beams, so powerful it was not yet manageable under conditions in CERN’s collider, but in the current crashes there are many other events to explore on what can cause Higgs boson to collapse to bottom quarks. It has been shown, however, that it is quite easy to detect much less frequent channels, such as the collapse of Higgs into two photons. These experiments are in accordance with the Standard model prediction.
“This measurement is a milestone in the research of Higgs boson,” said ATLAS Collaboration spokeswoman Karl Jacobs, adding that it showed that both ATLAS and CMS reached a level of deep understanding of their data and control of background processes.
“The excellent performance of the LHC accelerator with modern machine learning techniques has enabled us to achieve this result earlier than we expected,” said Joel Butler, spokeswoman for CMS Collaboration, adding that both collaborations have already managed to see top and bottom quark.