The Higgs boson was discovered in 2012 at the world’s most powerful particle collider, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland. This particle plays a unique role in fundamental physics. It gives all of the known elementary particles, including itself, their masses. To do this, it must transmit a new force to other particles, and it must also interact with itself. This last aspect is particularly strange, and has not been explored in experiments yet.
Higgs bosons are extremely rare even at the LHC – only one of them is produced per billion particle collisions – and their extremely short lifetime means they are not directly visible. They can only be studied indirectly by analyzing the particle collisions in which they participate.
At SLAC National Acceleratory Laboratory we are constructing the core of the biggest and fastest camera ever built to capture the Higgs boson in action. With more than 100 times more pixels than a typical digital camera, each one of which is much faster and more sensitive than typical camera pixels, it will be 10 times more powerful than the current cameras used to capture the results of particle collisions at the LHC. In this lecture, SLAC researcher Caterina Vernieri will explain how we will use this camera to probe the mysteries of the Higgs boson.