Long-sought decay of Higgs boson observed

UCL particle physicists are celebrating that the ATLAS Collaboration at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has - at long last - observed the Higgs boson decaying into a pair of bottom (b) quarks. The elusive interaction is predicted to make up almost 60% of the Higgs boson decays. "Finding the Higgs in its favoured decay channel was one of the key missing items in our knowledge of the Higgs boson. It opens a new window into our understanding of this intriguing particle and could ultimately provide the first hints of new physics beyond our current theories," said Dr Tim Scanlon (UCL Physics & Astronomy) who has played a leading role in Higgs searches on both the DZero (Tevatron, Fermilab) and ATLAS (Large Hadron Collider, CERN) experiments over the past 16 years. "This is the accumulation of the work of a lot of people over the last seven years, where each new result has built upon the last one, so it is fantastic for all those people who have been involved over the years to finally observe this critical decay." UCL has played a critical role in the analysis of data alongside other UK groups from the Universities of Birmingham, Glasgow, Liverpool, Queen Mary and Oxford. This includes work on the key detector elements, reconstruction algorithms, data collection and cutting-edge analysis techniques, with Dr Scanlon also leading the group over a key period, all of which culminated in this historic achievement that marks a crucial step forward in our understanding of the Higgs boson.