How a grad student got LHC data to play nice with quantum interference

Give meaning to the fusion of bosons

Each collision of particles at the LHC implies many possible paths in which different particles combine to give birth to the debris spray that the experiments see. In 2017, David Rousseau in IJCLAB in Orsay, a member of the Atlas collaboration, asked one of his students, Aishik Ghosh, to improve his team’s ability to detect a specific path. This particular way is quite important because it is used to measure the properties of the Higgs boson, a particle (measured for the first time in 2012) which helps to explain the mass of all other fundamental particles.

It was a fairly large demand. “When a graduate student launches into Atlas, he is a little cog in a giant and well -oiled machine of 3,500 physicists, who all seem to know exactly what they are doing,” said Ghosh.

The path that Ghosh was invited to study occurs via several steps. First, the two collision protons each issue a Boson W, a particle associated with low nuclear force. These two bosons merge, changing their identity to form a higgs boson. The Higgs boson then disintegrates, forming a pair of Z bosons, another particle associated with weak strength. Finally, these Z bosons themselves decompose in a Lepton, like an electron, and its partner of antimatière, like a positron.

Measures like that of Ghosh studied are a key means of studying the properties of the Higgs boson. By measuring precisely how long it takes to the Higgs boson to decompose, physicists could find evidence interacting with new non -discovered particles which are too massive for the LHC to produce directly.

Ghosh started the project, hoping to find a small improvement in well -tested methods of collaboration. Instead, he noticed a more important problem. The objective given to him, to detect a single path in itself, did not make sense.