Second anniversary of the Higgs boson discovery!

4 July 2014 | By

The famous subatomic bump: A mass plot from the ATLAS experiment showing the decay of the Higgs boson into four leptons. (Image: ATLAS Experiment/CERN)

It’s been two years since the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN jointly announced the discovery of a new boson consistent with the Higgs particle of the Standard Model. Since then, the Higgs boson has been intensely examined. We’ve measured its spin, its mass, its lifetime, and observed its decay into bosons and fermions. In the next run of the Large Hadron Collider, we hope to learn more about how it interacts with other particles and to make many more precise measurements of its properties. By doing, we hope to extend the limits of our current understanding of the fundamental components of nature, and to seek clues for discovery.

Here are glimpses of ATLAS’ journey since the announcement on 4 July 2012: