This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Is the universe as stable as we think it is? That's one of the big questions that particle physicists worldwide are preparing to answer with the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC—the world's most powerful particle accelerator—when its upgrade is completed in about four years.
In the meantime, researchers, including a cohort at the University of Michigan, are working to sharpen their analytical tools and techniques to make the most of the LHC's current and future data. A team including U-M physicists has now reported record-setting sensitivity in spotting a specific interaction within the LHC's data that may help answer fundamental questions about our universe. In particular, the analysis uses an advanced AI algorithm to spot signatures researchers are looking for to understand how the Higgs boson, the famous fundamental particle that helps explain how subatomic particles have mass, interacts with itself.
"This analysis is the most sensitive in the world to this specific physics," said Greg Myers, a research fellow in the U-M Department of Physics. Myers and U-M doctoral student Tamas Baer played key roles in developing the new method, with contributions from former postdoc Kevin Nelson and recent doctoral graduate Dustyn Hofer. The U-M team was led by Tom Schwarz, a professor of physics who has been working on this particular analysis for a decade.
U-M has also been deeply involved with this branch of research at the LHC, starting with Bing Zhou and Jianming Qian in 2010. The new analysis is about 60 times more sensitive than those early results, with an improvement of about 65% compared with its immediate predecessor, Schwarz said. This work was presented at the International Conference on High-Energy Physics in Natal, Brazil, in August and was recently published as an article on the arXiv preprint server.
When the LHC fired up in 2008, the biggest looming question at the time was whether the new accelerator could find the elusive Higgs boson. The particle had been predicted to exist decades earlier as theorists refined the Standard Model of Particle Physics, the best and most comprehensive accounting of the universe's fundamental particles and forces. Yet experiments could not provide direct physical evidence of the Higgs boson's existence before the LHC, which is operated by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
In 2012, two independent LHC experiments—one called ATLAS and the other CMS—provided that evidence. A year later, two European scientists behind the theory predicting the particle, François Englert and Peter Higgs, the particle's namesake, earned the Nobel Prize in Physics. With the discovery, physicists could then start asking and answering questions about how the Higgs worked.
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