• Physicist Huilin Qu vividly remembers the 2012 announcement of the discovery of the Higgs boson, a fundamental particle that helps explain the origin of mass. • The spokespeople of the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider gave detailed presentations on their experiments’ findings. • Qu was an undergrad studying physics at the time. • “We watched the webcast from a big auditorium at my university,” Qu says. • “I arrived late and was sitting in the back. • I didn’t understand much, but I was still very amazed.” During the presentation by the spokesperson of the CMS experiment, Qu had an idea.
Article Summaries:
- In 2012 the Higgs boson was announced, but its interactions with the lightest quarks have remained experimentally inaccessible. A new machine‑learning tool, developed by a CMS team led by post‑doc Loukas Gouskos and supported by former spokesperson Joe Incandela, aims to change that. The method uses a year‑long data‑analysis pause to train algorithms that can isolate rare Higgs decays into first‑generation particles. If successful, the tool would allow the Large Hadron Collider to test the Standard Model’s prediction that the Higgs couples to all quark generations, a measurement previously deemed “impossible.”
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