The Higgs celebrated its 10th anniversary at IJCLab

On September 9, in the Pierre Lehmann Auditorium of building 200 of IJCLab, an afternoon was organized by scientists from the CEA, the CNRS and the University of Paris-Saclay to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Higgs boson. It was an opportunity to review the contributions of the laboratories in the Orsay-Palaiseau-Saclay region to its discovery, both in terms of instrumentation and data analysis.

Indeed, July 4, 2012 was a day of joy for scientists, widely commented on around the world. A new particle, tracked down for a long time, necessary for the understanding of our Universe, has been identified and announced publicly at CERN: the Higgs boson. In the absence of the Higgs boson, the Standard Model of particle physics could only correctly describe the interactions of elementary particles of zero mass. The discovery of the W and Z intermediate bosons in 1983 at CERN by the UA1 and UA2 experiments was the first verification of a mechanism, known as "spontaneous symmetry breaking", proposed to solve this problem and which also implied the existence of the boson Higgs scalar. The search for this boson lasted several decades and required an international effort to build the necessary accelerator, the LHC, and the two dedicated detectors ATLAS and CMS.

The afternoon was opened with a recorded intervention by the Director General of CERN, Fabiola Gianotti, who outlined the long road to the advent of the LHC and the discovery of the boson by the two experiments. Then were discussed the innovative instrumental contributions of our laboratories which were decisive for the observation of this new particle, so long sought after, as well as the original and pioneering participation in the analyzes of the data which made it possible to identify this boson among the myriads other events produced in collisions at the LHC. The afternoon ended with a summary of the knowledge acquired since July 2012 on the properties of this boson as well as research plans for the near future.

The presentations of the various speakers and the photographs taken during this event can be consulted on the Indico site of the event.

See a selection of photos of Higgs 10 @Orsay Palaiseau Saclay  here

2022-09-21 13:58