ForumIAS announcing GS Foundation Program for UPSC CSE 2025-26 from 19 April. Click Here for more information.
ForumIAS Answer Writing Focus Group (AWFG) for Mains 2024 commencing from 24th June 2024. The Entrance Test for the program will be held on 28th April 2024 at 9 AM. To know more about the program visit: https://forumias.com/blog/awfg2024
Contents
Source: This summary is based on the article “The decade-long search for a rare Higgs boson decay continues“, published in The Hindu on 6th June 2023.
What is the News?
Physicists at CERN, working with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), have reported detecting a rare decay process where a Higgs boson decayed into a Z boson and a photon.
What is Higgs Boson?
The Higgs boson is a subatomic particle that is integral to our understanding of mass. The strength of a particle’s interaction with the Higgs boson determines its mass.
The LHC creates a Higgs boson by accelerating protons into a high-energy collision, resulting in a release of energy that forms different particles.
What are the recent findings?
As the Higgs boson is a heavy particle, it is unstable and decays into lighter particles
As per the Standard Model of physics, it is predicted that a Higgs boson will decay into a Z boson and a photon 0.1% of the time. This means the LHC needed to have created at least 1,000 Higgs bosons to have been able to spot one of them decaying to a Z boson and a photon.
This rare decay process was detected by physicists at the LHC.
Two detectors at the LHC, ATLAS and CMS, have combined their data from 2015 to 2018, improving the statistical precision of their searches. However, the data does not yet confirm this decay pathway with 100% certainty.
What is the significance of the study?
Understanding the behavior and properties of the Higgs boson can provide significant insights into the nature of our universe. Its decay process can help test the predictions of the Standard Model of physics.
It is because even after the success of this model, it can’t answer the questions like what dark matter is or, in fact, why the Higgs boson is so heavy.
By testing its predictions with precision, physicists are looking for possible inconsistencies or “cracks” in the Standard Model, which may validate new theories in physics.
