Boson

Higgs boson glimpsed at work for first time

• 11:43 17 July 2014 by Lisa Grossman
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The world's largest particle collider has given us our first glimpse of the Higgs boson doing its job.

For 50 years, the Higgs boson was the final missing piece in the standard model of particle physics, which elegantly predicts how fundamental particles and forces interact. The ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, was one of the detectors that helped discover the Higgsin 2012.

Now ATLAS physicists report seeing pairs of particles called W bosons scattering off each other inside the detector. This rare process can be used to test how the Higgs actually operates.

"We know these particles very well, but we have never seen them interact in this way before," says Marc-André Pleier at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. "With this measurement, we can check that the Higgs boson does its job."