Physicists detect process even rarer than the long-sought Higgs particle
Tuesday, July 15, 2014 - 13:30
in Physics & Chemistry
(Phys.org) —Scientists running the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest and most powerful "atom smasher," report the first evidence of a process that can be used to test the mechanism by which the recently discovered Higgs particle imparts mass to other fundamental particles. More rare than the production of the Higgs itself, this process—a scattering of two same-charged particles called W bosons off one another—also provides a new stringent test of the Standard Model of particle physics. The findings, which so far are in agreement with predictions of the Standard Model, are reported in a paper just accepted by Physical Review Letters.