Speaker
Dr
Todd Brian Huffman
(University of Oxford (GB))
Description
On July 4th of this year we all know what was dominating the Headlines. "Higgs boson-like discovery claimed at LHC" enthused the BBC. The New York Times was far more excited with the headline: "Physicists Find Elusive Particle Seen as Key to Universe". Many of us watched Fabiola Gianotti and Joe Incandela's talks on the discovery from ATLAS and CMS respectively and in the end saw many plots and tables, mostly about backgrounds and statistical analyses, that lead up to one or two final plots in the end setting confidence levels.
In this talk I hope to take these discoveries a bit more slowly. The talk will have two main sections, the first of which will be the background to the discovery. There will be an explanation as to why the Higgs boson was invented in the first place, then given that it was, why we needed to build a machine with a radiation profile that almost no electronic equipment or sensors could survive. I will then explain how the Higgs boson decays and why only certain decay channels ended up being the ones presented in July.
The second section will focus on the results obtained. I will look at the "golden channels" and explain a bit about what kind of detector is needed to find the Higgs in these channels. However, the game at this stage is all about the backgrounds and so some discussion on the largest background will be needed. The final part of the talk ends with the final plots from ATLAS and CMS from the discovery in July so that one can see how it all happened.
Primary authors
Anthony Weidberg
(University of Oxford (GB))
Dr
Chris Hays
(University of Oxford (GB))
Dr
Todd Brian Huffman
(University of Oxford (GB))
