A Higgs boson pair candidate event with four particle showers (jets) which were initiated by b-quarks in 13 TeV proton-proton collisions. This collision event was recorded with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in 2016. The tracks of the produced particles are displayed as green lines. The energy deposits in the calorimeters are shown as yellow, orange, green or blue cuboids, where the length of the cuboid is proportional to the deposited transverse energy.
Searching for Higgs boson pair production at the Large Hadron Collider The Standard Model of particle physics predicts that the Higgs boson should couple to itself, and produce for example Higgs boson pairs. Researchers in the HiggsSelfCoupling ERC project are analysing data from the Large Hadron Collider and developing tools to look for evidence of di-Higgs production, as Professor Çiğdem İşsever explains. The existence of the Higgs boson was experimentally verified at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012, and researchers continue to study its properties and are trying to find experimental evidence that it interacts with itself. As the Principal Investigator of the HiggsSelfCoupling project, Professor Çiğdem İşsever is investigating the process by which pairs of Higgs bosons are produced, research which could shed new light on whether the shape of the Higgs potential matches theoretical predictions. “By understanding Higgs selfcoupling, through the production of pairs of Higgs bosons, we will be able to see if the shape of the Higgs potential is really as predicted by theorists,” she outlines. “The shape of the Higgs potential has important implications on structures in the universe and the fate of the universe.” New insights into the strength of the Higgs self-coupling could help scientists
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learn more about the Higgs mechanism, a mechanism which explains how elementary particles acquire mass. “The Higgs potential is a scalar field which has been the focus of a lot of attention in research. But what we haven’t yet probed is whether the shape of this potential is really as earlier theorists predicted, or if
HiggsSelfCoupling project
This topic is central to Professor İşsever’s work in the HiggsSelfCoupling project, in which she and her colleagues are analysing data from particle collisions at the LHC recorded by the ATLAS experiment, looking to identify collisions where pairs of Higgs bosons were produced. This involves
“We try to identify what kinds of particles were produced in collisions at the Large Hadron Collider, what energies they had, and the directions they were flowing in from the point of collision.” it is actually different in some way,” says Professor İşsever. “The way to probe this is through measuring the strength of the Higgs coupling to itself, through the production of Higgs pairs, because the production rate of Higgs pairs depends on the strength of the Higgs self-coupling.”
studying the debris from the vast number of collisions generated within the ATLAS detector and working through the available data. “We try to identify what kinds of particles were produced in collisions, what energies they had, and the directions they were flowing in from the point of collision,”
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