The search for the Higgs boson was a 40-year effort by physicists to prove the existence or non-existence of the Higgs boson, first theorised in the 1960s. The Higgs boson was the last unobserved fundamental particle in the Standard Model of particle physics, and its discovery was described as being the "ultimate verification" of the Standard Model. In March 2013, the Higgs boson was officially confirmed to exist.
This confirmed answer proved the existence of the hypothetical Higgs field—a field of immense significance that is hypothesised as the source of electroweak symmetry breaking and the means by which elementary particles acquire mass. Symmetry breaking is considered proven but confirming exactly how this occurs in nature is a major unanswered question in physics. Proof of the Higgs field (by observing the associated particle) validates the final unconfirmed part of the Standard Model as essentially correct, avoiding the need for alternative sources for the Higgs mechanism. Evidence of its properties is likely to greatly affect human understanding of the universe and open up "new" physics beyond current theories.
Despite their importance, the search and the proof were extremely difficult and took decades, because direct production, detection and verification of the Higgs boson on the scale needed to confirm the discovery and learn its properties required a very large experimental project and huge computing resources. For this reason, most experiments until around 2011 aimed to exclude ranges of masses that the Higgs could not have. Ultimately the search led to the construction of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland, the largest particle accelerator in the world, designed especially for this and other high-energy tests of the Standard Model.
Background The Higgs boson
The Higgs boson, sometimes called the Higgs particle, is an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics produced by the quantum excitation of the Higgs field, one of the fields in particle physics theory. In the Standard Model, the Higgs particle is a massive scalar boson with zero spin, even (positive) parity, no electric charge, and no colour charge, that couples to (interacts with) mass. It is also very unstable, decaying into other particles almost immediately.
Experimental requirements Like other massive particles (e.g. the top quark and W and Z bosons), Higgs bosons decay to other particles almost immediately, long before they can be observed directly. However, the Standard Model precisely predicts the possible modes of decay and their probabilities. This allows the creation and decay of a Higgs boson to be shown by careful examination of the decay products of collisions.
Therefore, although approaches to proving the Higgs were studied in early research from the 1960s, when the particle was proposed, large-scale experimental searches only commenced in the 1980s, with the opening of particle accelerators sufficiently powerful to provide evidence related to the Higgs boson.
Since the Higgs boson, if it existed, could have any mass in a very wide range, a number of very advanced facilities were eventually required for the search. These included very powerful particle accelerator and detectors (in order to create Higgs bosons and detect their decay, if possible), and processing and analysis of vast amounts of data, requiring very large worldwide computing facilities. For example, over 300 trillion (3 × 1014) proton-proton collisions at the LHC were analysed in confirming the July 2012 particle's discovery, requiring construction of the so-called LHC Computing Grid, the world's largest computing grid (as of 2012) comprising over 170 computing facilities in 36 countries.Hunt for Higgs boson hits key decision pointWorldwide LHC Computing Grid main page 14 November 2012: "[A] global collaboration of more than 170 computing centres in 36 countries ... to store, distribute and analyse the ~25 Petabytes (25 million Gigabytes) of data annually generated by the Large Hadron Collider"What is the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid? (Public 'About' page) 14 November 2012: "Currently WLCG is made up of more than 170 computing centers in 36 countries...The WLCG is now the world's largest computing grid" Experimental techniques included examination of a wide range of possible masses (often quoted in GeV) in order to gradually narrow down the search area and rule out possible masses where the Higgs was unlikely, statistical analysis, and operation of multiple experiments and teams in order to see if the results from all were in agreement.
Experimental search and discovery of unknown boson Early limits During the early 1970s there were only few constraints on the existence of the Higgs boson. The limits that did exist came from the absence of the observation of Higgs related effects in nuclear physics, neutron stars, and neutron scattering experiments. This resulted in the conclusion that the Higgs—if it existed—was heavier than .
Early collider phenomenology In the mid-1970s, the first studies exploring how the Higgs boson may show itself in particle collision experiments were published. However, the prospect of actually finding the particle were not very good; the authors of one of the first articles on Higgs phenomenology warned:
One of the problems was that at the time there was almost no clue to the mass of the Higgs boson. Theoretical considerations left open a very wide range somewhere between and with no real indication where to look.
Large Electron–Positron Collider In the early planning studies for the Large Electron–Positron Collider (LEP) at CERN, the Higgs boson played no role. In fact, it does not appear to be mentioned in any of the reports until 1979. The first detailed study examining the possibilities of discovering the Higgs boson at LEP appeared in 1986. Thereafter the search for the Higgs boson became firmly established within the LEP program.
As its name implies, the Large Electron–Positron Collider collided electrons with positrons. The three most important ways in which such a collision could lead to the production of a Higgs boson were: The electron and the positron together produce a Z boson which in turn decay to a Higgs boson and a pair of fermions. The electron and the positron together produce a Z boson which in turn radiates away a Higgs boson. (Higgs strahlung) The electron and the positron exchange a W or Z boson which along the way emits a Higgs boson. The fact that no decays of the Z boson to the Higgs were observed at LEP immediately implies that the Higgs boson, if it existed, must be heavier than the Z boson (~). Subsequently, with each successive energy upgrade of the LEP, hope re-emerged that discovery of the Higgs was just around the corner. Just prior to the planned shut down of LEP in 2000, few events that resemble a Higgs boson with a mass of ~ were observed. This led to extension of the final LEP run by a few months. But in the end the data was inconclusive and insufficient to justify another run after the winter break and the difficult decision was made to shut down and dismantle LEP to make room for the new Large Hadron Collider in November 2000. The inconclusive results of the direct search for the Higgs boson at LEP resulted in a final lower bound of the Higgs mass at the 95% confidence level.
In parallel to the direct search program, LEP made precision measurements of many observables of the weak interactions. These observables are sensitive to the value of the Higgs mass through contributions of processes containing loops of virtual Higgs bosons. This allowed for the first time a direct estimate of the Higgs mass of about . This estimate however is subject to the condition that the Standard Model is all there is, and no physics beyond the Standard Model come into play at these energy levels. New physical effects could potentially alter this estimate substantially.
Superconducting Super Collider Planning for a new powerful collider to explore new physics at the >1 TeV scale had already started in 1983. The Superconducting Super Collider was to accelerate protons in an underground circular tunnel just outside Dallas, Texas to energies of each. One of the primary goals of this megaproject was finding the Higgs boson.
In preparation for this machine, extensive phenomenological studies were produced for the production of Higgs bosons in hadron colliders. The big downside of hadron colliders for search for the Higgs is that they collide composite particles, and as a consequence produce many more background events and provide less information about the initial state of the collision. On the other hand, they provide a much higher centre-of-mass energy than lepton colliders (such as LEP) of a similar technological level. However, hadron colliders also provide another way producing a Higgs boson through the collision of two gluons mediated by a triangle of heavy (top or bottom) quarks.
The Superconducting Super Collider project however was plagued by budget problems, and in 1993 Congress decided to pull the plug on the project, despite $2 billion having already been spent.
Tevatron
On 1 March 2001, the Tevatron Proton-antiproton (p) collider at Fermilab near Chicago commenced its run 2. After run 1 (1992–1996), in which the collider had discovered the top quark, Tevatron had shut down for significant upgrades focused on improving the potential for finding the Higgs boson; the energies of the protons and antiprotons was bumped up to , and the number of collisions per second was increased by an order of magnitude (with further increases planned as the run continued). Even with the upgrades Tevatron was not guaranteed to find the Higgs. If the Higgs were too heavy (>), then the collisions would not have enough energy to produce a Higgs boson. If it were too light (<), then the Higgs would predominantly decay to pairs of bottom quarks—a signal that would be swamped by background events, and the Tevatron would not produce enough collisions to filter out the statistics. Nonetheless, the Tevatron was at the time the only operational particle collider that was sufficiently powerful to be capable of seeking the Higgs particle.
Operation was planned to continue until the Tevatron could no longer keep up with the Large Hadron Collider. This point was reached on 30 September 2011, when the Tevatron was shut down. In their final analyses, the collaborations of the two detectors at Tevatron (CDF and DØ) report that based on their data they can exclude the possibility of a Higgs boson with a mass between and and between and at a 95% confidence level. In addition, they found an excess of events that could be from a Higgs boson in the range 115–. However, the significance of the statistics is deemed too low to base any conclusions on.
On 22 December 2011, the DØ collaboration also reported limitations on the Higgs boson within the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model, an extension to the Standard Model. Proton-antiproton (p) collisions with a centre-of-mass energy of 1.96 TeV had allowed them to set an upper limit for Higgs boson production within MSSM ranging from 90 to 300 GeV, and excluding > 20–30 for masses of the Higgs boson below 180 GeV ( is the ratio of the two Higgs doublet vacuum expectation values).
Large Hadron Collider Full operation at the LHC was delayed for 14 months from its initial successful tests, on 10 September 2008, until mid-November 2009, following a magnet quench event nine days after its inaugural tests that damaged over 50 superconducting magnets and contaminated the vacuum system. The quench was traced to a faulty electrical connection and repairs took several months; electrical fault detection and rapid quench-handling systems were also upgraded.