Higgs Research at Edinburgh

Scientists from the University of Edinburgh are working to discover more about the Higgs boson

Particle physicsts in Edinburgh are searching for evidence for the Higgs boson using data collected by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva.  The University of Edinburgh is a member of the Atlas collaboration, one of two experiments at the LHC who should be able to directly detect the Higgs boson.  The team in Edinburgh are led Prof Phil Clark and Dr Victoria Martin, and have recently been joined by Dr Christos Leonidopoulos.  The twenty-strong Atlas team in Edinburgh are working with our collaborators on the Higgs boson by looking at two different ways that the Higgs boson is predicted to decay: Higgs decaying into one bottom quark (b) and one anti-bottom quark (b̄): H→bb̄, and Higgs decaying into two Z-bosons: H→ZZ.  The Z-bosons decay further themselves into pairs of electrons (e) or muons (μ) and thus we actually search for four charged leptons (e or μ).  Some images from our first results on H→bb̄ searches are shown below.

Over the years, Edinburgh particle physics theorists have also made significant contributions to the exploitation of processes such as Higgs to bottom quarks (H→bb̄)and Higgs to photons (​H→γγ), besides developing understanding of the background to these processes due to interacting quarks and gluons. Currently our work focuses on the determination of parton density functions, understanding jets, and developing new models of the physics which may underpin the Higgs itself.  The recently estalished Higgs Centre for Theortical Physics will foster further work in this area.

Read more:

• The ATLAS Experiment
• ATLAS searches for Higgs bosons decaying into a b-quark pair
• Edinburgh Particle Physics Experiments
• Edinburgh Particle Physics Theory
• The Tait Institute
• History of the Tait Institute