First Signs of Rare Higgs Boson Decay Discovered by Physicists

A refined hunt for the extremely rare transformation of the Higgs boson has delivered results, providing the first evidence of a process that could hint at unknown particles.

Reconciling the results of several years’ worth of proton crashes inside two different detectors at the European Organization for Nuclear Research’s (CERN) Large Hadron Collider (LHC), physicists bumped up the statistical precision of the rate at which the famous ‘mass-giving’ particle decayed into a photon and a Z boson.

The results, shared at the LHC Physics Conference in Belgrade last week, fall well short of what…