The Large Hadron Collider recently reopened after upgrades and is ready to explore new territory
Imagine that you have just arrived on a planet in another solar system. Suddenly, five minutes after you landed, you spot an alien life-form. This is an amazing discovery! You may well spend decades trying to understand this exotic being, probing its properties and investigating how it came to be there. At the same time, you expect that there may be other fascinating creatures around, maybe even more intriguing than the first and possibly much harder to get a glimpse of.
The Higgs boson was the remaining piece of the Standard Model of particle physics, our leading theory of the properties and interactions among the fundamental bits of nature. Much of particle physics does not fit into this model, however. The current state of our field feels like trying to understand the science of cooking when all you have is a good grasp on the theory of how water boils. The Standard Model is silent about dark matter and even the force of gravity.
So far we have only seen collisions that produce a single Higgs boson at a time. But we think that it should also be possible to produce two Higgs bosons in one collision. This “di-Higgs” production would give us a direct window into how the Higgs energy field turned on after the big bang because it is a direct measure of how strongly the Higgs boson, and therefore the Higgs energy field, interacts with itself.
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