This week I’ve been at the Higgs Hunting workshop in Orsay near Paris, France. This also happens to be my home institute, so there was no travel involved. The conference is three days long and brings together theorists and experimentalists from around the world to discuss current Higgs results, and also to explore what we can expect (or even hope) to find in the future.
The Higgs boson was discovered at CERN in 2012 after a very long search (it was proposed in 1964!) and is the particle produced when the Higgs field interacts with itself. The Higgs field is the process that gives mass to fundamental particles. Most of the studies at CMS and ATLAS of this new boson are moving from discovery (simply finding if there is a particle there) to precision measurements (understanding how it interacts with other particles and measuring various properties). So far what we’ve found out about the Higgs is exactly what we expect from our theory: the Standard Model of Particle Physics. This is very boring for particle physicists as we love to find out that our theories are wrong! It is very important to make these studies to have a more complete picture of how our universe works, plus there are questions, such as what is dark matter, that could be explained by studying the Higgs in greater detail.
The first day of the workshop concluded with Sir Tom Kibble giving a talk on the ‘Prehistory of the Higgs’. Sir Tom is one of six theorists who, in three independent papers in the 1960’s, came up with the theory for the mechanism that gives mass to particles.
The final day of the workshop took place at the Institut des Cordeliers in central Paris with a beautiful courtyard leading to the auditorium (see below). The morning session focused on constraints on the Higgs boson, with the afternoon dedicated to discussions on future colliders.
It was a really interesting conference and, since I’m based at LAL, I’m already looking forward to going next year!
Clara Nellist 