![]() ![]() ![]() Interestingly, just when data-taking was finishing at LEP, there were calls by some members of one of the teams to delay the shutdown by a year or so because they had seen a little excess signal at a certain energy that might have indicated the Higgs. When LEP was dismantled in 2001 to make way for the LHC, we knew that if the standard-model Higgs boson existed, then its mass was, unfortunately, in a range beyond the reach of LEP. The other way is to spot it indirectly by measuring other processes sensitive to interactions with the Higgs boson. ![]() One is to measure it directly like we did at the LHC it just appeared in the experiment. There are two ways physicists can detect the Higgs boson. But LEP was thought to be a place where we might see the particle. How optimistic were researchers that they would find the Higgs boson at LEP?Īt that time, we didn’t know for sure that the Higgs existed, and if it did exist, we didn’t know what its mass was. Physics Magazine spoke to Vincter about the searches for the Higgs boson at LEP and at ATLAS, and her hopes for the next major milestone in particle physics.Īll interviews are edited for brevity and clarity. She was part of ATLAS’s Canada team when the Higgs boson was discovered and has remained with the ATLAS Collaboration ever since. There, she helped assemble and test one of ATLAS’s particle detectors. In 1998, Vincter moved to the ATLAS experiment, which was conceived with the Higgs boson firmly in its cross hairs. Researchers also thought that LEP had a reasonable chance of spotting another boson that fascinated Vincter-the Higgs boson-although that wasn’t to be. LEP had been designed to probe the limits of the standard model of particle physics-the theory that classifies all the known particles- by testing such processes with unprecedented precision. Vincter’s early research focused on the symmetry-breaking process by which W and Z bosons, carriers of the weak force, acquire mass. She started in high-energy physics in the early 1990s, when, as a master’s student, she joined CERN’s Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP) and began what she calls an ongoing “love affair” with W and Z bosons. Ī high-energy physicist at Carleton University, Canada, and a deputy spokesperson for the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland, Manuella Vincter has spent her whole career working on high-energy-physics problems. See also: Poem: Higgs Boson: The Cosmic Glyph Research News: A Particle is Born: Making the Higgs Famous News Feature: The Era of Higgs Physics Podcast: The Higgs, Ten Years After and Collection: The History of Observations of the Higgs Boson. This article is part of a series of pieces that Physics Magazine is publishing to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Higgs boson discovery. ![]()
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