University of Illinois particle physicist Scott Willenbrock first theorized the Higgs boson decay to a W boson pair more than two decades ago.
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University of Illinois particle physicist Scott Willenbrock first theorized the Higgs boson decay to a W boson pair more than two decades ago.
Scott Willenbrock
In a paper submitted to the journal Physics Letters B, the ATLAS collaboration at CERN reports its strongest evidence yet (at a 5.9 sigma) for the presence of a new Higgs-like particle—from analyses of events that include Higgs decays into two W bosons.
Until today’s ATLAS report publication, Willenbrock, who has been involved in theoretical studies of the Higgs particle since 1985, had not realized that the WW decay mode he and two colleagues had predicted in 1988 had in fact already been observed.
Willenbrock said it’s gratifying to know his theoretical work contributed something to the experimental discovery of a new subatomic particle consistent with the long-sought Higgs boson—the final missing piece in the standard model of particle physics.
“By far and away, I feel very satisfied that something I did turned out to be useful,” said Willenbrock.
Simulated production of a Higgs event at the ATLAS detector on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN.
At the time his paper “Higgs-boson decay to one real and one virtual W boson” appeared in Physical Review D, v 37, 3193 (1988), Willenbrock worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His co-author Nigel Glover was at that time a post-doctoral researcher at CERN; he is currently a professor of physics at University of Durham. Co-author James Ohnemus was in 1988 a graduate student in physics at UW-Madison, and currently works in the private sector.
In their 1988 paper, the three researchers proposed that the Higgs boson could be observed decaying into a pair of W bosons, which in turn would decay to electrons and neutrinos. The neutrinos would be invisible to the detector, so the observation would be based only on a pair of electrons.
"At the time, nobody believed this would be feasible," said Willenbrock.
Since 1994, University of Illinois experimental physicists have been heavily involved in the design, building, commissioning, data taking, and data analysis at the ATLAS experiment at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research based in Geneva, Switzerland. Today’s report marks another exciting contribution from University of Illinois faculty.
Writer:Siv Schwink, Department of Physics, 217/552-5671.
Illustration courtesy of CERN.
If you have any questions about the College of Engineering, or other story ideas, contact Rick Kubetz, editor, Engineering Communications Office, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 217/244-7716.
