The Higgs was postulated in the 1960s to help explain how basic elements of the universe fit together and interact. Physicists have searched for more than four decades to observe the never-before-seen Higgs. Higgs is responsible for a phenomenon called the Higgs mechanism, which gives mass to the fundamental particles of nature. The world’s newest and largest high-energy particle accelerator, the CERN Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, give an opportunity to observe Higgs in the next few years.
This article discussed about the measurement of the mass of the top quark and two-lepton analysis, one of almost a dozen analyses of the mass of the top quark at a Fermilab experiment called DZero. This analysis looked at particles resulting from smashing protons that break apart and disintegrate. The detector can’t see two of the important “ghost” particles — neutrinos — produced by the collision. However, the two leptons are well-measured events and are not seen in other “background” collisions where top quarks are not produced. This allows a rapidly improving precision of measurements of the top quark’s mass. Several measurements of the top quark’s mass are combined to a “world average” value.
This article also said that the new world average is so precise that it constrains more tightly than ever the range of possible measurements for the mass of the Higgs. If the Higgs does prove different than currently expected, physicists may have to rework their long-standing theoretical framework, known as the Standard Model. Scientists worldwide are hoping to validate the Standard Model by actually observing the Higgs.
Read this article for more detail about this topic.
Source: Southern Methodist University (web)