Higgs Discovery Animation By CMS
For the series "ideas worth spreading", CMS has copied the nice idea of ATLAS of producing an animated gif with increasing data leading to the Higgs boson discovery.This is the mass distribution of Higgs boson candidates, detected by collecting events featuring four charged leptons (electrons or muons). The leptons are combined in pairs, and one pair (of same flavour) will usually yield a mass in the ballpark of the Z boson mass; the other pair will have lower energy if it is produced by an off-shell Z boson. Of course all four-lepton pairs compatible with quality criteria are kept, and the mass distribution thus contains a majority of events due to standard model production of ZZ pairs. This is the peaking background at masses above 180 GeV. read more