Higgs Boson Search Update

On Wednesday 4 July at 09:00 CEST, CERN will hold a scientific seminar to deliver the latest update in the search for the Higgs boson. At this seminar, the ATLAS and CMS experiments will deliver the preliminary results of their 2012 data analysis. ICTP and colleagues at the University of Udine have been active participants of this international research collaboration.

The seminar will be available via webcast at http://webcast.cern.ch/ and will be broadcast live at ICTP starting at 08:45 in the Euler Lecture Hall of the Leonardo Building.

The Higgs boson is a key component of the Standard Model, a highly successful theory that provides a very precise description of matter. Identification of the Higgs boson would be a major accomplishment, providing physicists with a better understanding of the mechanism that gives mass to elementary particles and opening the door to a variety of new physics searches.

ATLAS and CMS are particle physics experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. They are searching for new discoveries (such as the Higgs boson) in the head-on collisions of protons of extraordinarily high energy.

According to a CERN press release, if and when a new particle is discovered, ATLAS and CMS will need time to ascertain whether it is the long sought Higgs boson, the last missing ingredient of the Standard Model of particle physics, or whether it is a more exotic form of the boson that could open the door to new physics.

ICTP's involvement in the ATLAS experiment is led by high-energy physicist Bobby Acharya. He explained that the ICTP/Udine ATLAS group has contributed to the measurement of some of the important "backgrounds" to the search for the Higgs.

"A background is something that could look like a Higgs but is not. In particular, there is a quark in the Standard Model called the top quark, and the production of top quarks with anti-top quarks in LHC collisions is one of the main backgrounds to Higgs searches. The ICTP/Udine group has played an important role in developing techniques for measuring top/anti-top production in ATLAS. We are also involved in the search for the Higgs when it is produced in association with top/anti-top pairs, though this requires a lot more data than we currently have to be seen," said Acharya.

The ICTP/Udine ATLAS group has received generous funding from the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN).

For more information:

• ATLAS Factsheet
• Higgs Boson Backgrounders