Scientists Observe Decay of Higgs Boson Particle into Two Bottom Quarks

Geneva, 28 August 2018. 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. This elusive interaction is predicted to make up almost 60% of the Higgs boson decays and is thus primarily responsible for the Higgs natural width. Yet it took over six years after the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson to accomplish this observation.

"ATLAS is proud to announce the observation of this important and challenging Higgs boson decay," says Karl Jakobs, ATLAS Spokesperson. "While the result is certainly a confirmation of the Standard Model, it is equally a triumph for our analysis teams. During the early preparations of the LHC, there were doubts on whether this observation could be achieved. Our success is thanks to the excellent performance of the LHC and the ATLAS detector, and the application of highly sophisticated analysis techniques to our large dataset."

The ATLAS Collaboration first presented a preliminary result of this observation on 9 July at the 2018 International Conference on High-Energy Physics (ICHEP) in Seoul. Today, in a seminar together with the CMS Collaboration, ATLAS presented results which have been submitted for publication to Physics Letters B. They are based on combined Run 2 and Run 1 data, and utilise machine learning technology and new analysis techniques to reach a significance of 5.4 standard deviations.

 This elusive interaction is predicted to make up almost 60% of the Higgs boson decays and is thus primarily responsible for the Higgs natural width.

 

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