A proton-proton collision event in the CMS experiment produces two high-energy photons (the red towers). This is what physicists would expect to see from the decay of a Higgs boson, but it is also consistent with background Standard Model physics processes.
A proton-proton collision event in the CMS experiment produces two high-energy photons (the red towers). This is what physicists would expect to see from the decay of a Higgs boson, but it is also consistent with background Standard Model physics processes. CERN
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Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider announced their Higgs boson likely-discovery on July 4, but now it’s (a little) more official: The first scientific papers describing the new Higgs-like boson have been set in ink.

The huge particle collider’s two main experiments, the ATLAS and CMS collaborations, published their findings in the journal Physics Letters B.

CMS spokesperson Joe Incandela said they’re the most important scientific studies to come out of the LHC so far, and they’re both freely available. You can go here to read the ATLAS paper, “Observation of a new particle in the search for the Standard Model Higgs boson with the ATLAS detector at the LHC.” Go here to read the CMS paper, “Observation of a new boson at a mass of 125 GeV with the CMS experiment at the LHC.” And then tell us what you think the Drell-Yan process means.

CERN