INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Each particle collision at the LHC involves many possible pathways in which different particles combine to give rise to the spray of debris
In 2017, David Rousseau at IJCLab in Orsay, a member of the ATLAS collaboration, asked one of his students, Aishik Ghosh, to improve his
that helps explain the mass of all other fundamental particles.It was a pretty big ask
First, the two colliding protons each emit a W boson, a particle associated with the weak nuclear force
These two bosons fuse together, changing their identity to form a Higgs boson
The Higgs boson then decays, forming a pair of Z bosons, another particle associated with the weak force
Finally, those Z bosons themselves each decay into a lepton, like an electron, and its antimatter partner, like a positron.
A Feynman
diagram for the pathway studied by Aishik Ghosh.
Credit:
ATLAS
Measurements like the one Ghosh was studying are a key way of investigating the properties of the Higgs boson
By precisely measuring how long it takes the Higgs boson to decay, physicists could find evidence of it interacting with new, undiscovered
particles that are too massive for the LHC to produce directly.Ghosh started on the project, hoping to find a small improvement in the
Instead, he noticed a larger issue
