Rice University physicists are available to discuss the July 4 anniversary of the Higgs boson discovery and the recent restart of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for a third round of experiments.
The dramatic announcement in 2012 by the European Organization for Nuclear Research completed the first goal of the LHC, the proton-smashing, 17-mile ring at the border of France and Switzerland.
The Higgs was the last particle predicted by the Standard Model of physics to be confirmed.
Rice physicist Paul Padley and Karl Ecklund have contributed to the Compact Muon Solenoid, one of two major experiments attached to the LHC, since before the discovery. Physicist Darin Acosta joined them at Rice in 2021, and is currently leader of the overall CMS Trigger project.
Collectively, their labs are developing software and designing and building electronic components to handle the flood of data that emerges every time the collider smashes two particles together at nearly the speed of light. This happens about a billion times a second.
“We actually have to throw away 99.998% of the data,” Acosta said. “It’s just too much volume, even by today’s standards.” New components designed at Rice will help scrape the surface of that data for traces of exotic particles in the scattered remains.
“We plan by the end of this decade to take data at a higher rate, by a factor of 10, and we’ll be able to do much more detailed studies,” Padley said. “That will be a petabyte of data a second.”
Ecklund noted the Higgs is expected to give other particles mass and couples to itself, raising the possibility of novel interactions yet to be seen. The researchers said the decade since the Higgs discovery has led to better understanding of the particle, including its own mass: 125.35 plus or minus 0.15 giga-electron volts.
“From that point going forward, the Higgs became a new tool for discovery,” Padley said. “It gives us another window to look for dark matter and other physics. And a lot of new physics models have more than one Higgs boson.”
“What’s exciting is that we could see contributions from particles we haven’t discovered,” Ecklund said.
If you would like to speak to Padley, Ecklund or Acosta, contact Mike Williams at mikewilliams@rice.edu or at 713-348-6728.
- Images for download
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Rice University firmware engineer Patrick Kelling works on circuitry bound for the Large Hadron Collider. (Credit: Rice University)
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Darin Acosta. (Credit: Rice University)
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Karl Ecklund, left, and Paul Padley. (Credit: Rice University)
- About Rice
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Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 4,240 undergraduates and 3,972 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is just under 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for lots of race/class interaction and No. 1 for quality of life by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance.
