NEWS
04 July 2022

Happy birthday, Higgs boson! What we do and don’t know about the particle

Physicists are celebrating ten years since the Higgs boson’s discovery. But many of its properties remain mysterious.

Elizabeth Gibney

Elizabeth Gibney

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An engineers works between two massive wheels in the cavern of the ATLAS experiment at CERN during an upgrade in 2021 — Part of the Large Hadron Collider’s ATLAS detector. Credit: Maximilien Brice, Julien Marius Ordan/CERN

On 4 July 2012, physicists at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory, declared victory in their long search for the Higgs boson. The elusive particle’s discovery filled in the last gap in the standard model — physicists’ best description of particles and forces — and opened a new window on physics by providing a way to learn about the Higgs field, which involves a previously unstudied kind of interaction that gives particles their masses.

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Nature 607, 220-221 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-01834-5

References

The CMS collaboration et al. J. High Energ. Phys. 2021, 148 (2021).
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The CMS collaboration. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.06923 (2022).

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