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New Higgs results bring relief—and disappointment
- pif 14y ago> Instead, physicists must count up the number of particles that detectors observe and tease out those that may have come from a momentarily existent Higgs. If the Standard Model is correct, physicists know how many of these daughter particles they should see. I find this part very confusing: physicists count the number of collisions that lead to a Higgs boson, but understanding whether a Higgs was there is not just a matter of counting particles. You need particle identification, energy measurement, track extrapolation and invariant mass calculation. CERN has its share of bean-counters, but not that much :-)