It’s been almost exactly two years since the announcement of the discovery of the Higgs boson. Meanwhile, Peter Higgs received the Nobel Prize for physics with François Englert for theorizing its existence but the research haven’t certainly stopped. A team of researchers of the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) experiment at CERN has just published in the journal “Nature Physics” an article that discusses more evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson, in particular its decay into fermions.

The data collected in the long work done using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the largest particle accelerator in the world, were analyzed further after the July 2012 announcement. The discovery of the Higgs boson is perhaps the greatest scientific achievement of the beginning of the third millennium and exactly for this reason it must be analyzed in depth so as to leave no doubt about it nor overlook any details.

The discovery of the Higgs boson took decades because it requires very high energies, available the LHC only a few years ago. Another problem is that this particle has an incredibly short life so it can be detected only through the effects of its decay. In 2012, the CMS and ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus) experiments at CERN found other bosons that were precisely those which, according to the standard model, were created by the decay of the Higgs boson.

By analyzing the data from the ATLAS and CMS experiments in 2011 and 2012, a team of scientists at CERN has detected another type of decay of the Higgs boson, this time in fermions, the other fundamental class of particles. According to the analysis, this type of decay occurs at a rate consistent with that predicted by the standard model.

These analyzes are allowing to understand the BEH, Brout-Englert-Higgs, mechanism, so called from the names of the physicists who theorized the Higgs boson. Robert Brout is included: he didn’t receive the Nobel Prize together with his colleagues because sadly he died in 2011. Verifying that the Higgs boson decays into fermions too was a key step in the research.

This is still only a step forward and CERN scientists are setting up new experiments to be conducted in the coming years, when the LHC will be reopened and allow to reach power higher than those of the past. There are still many unanswered questions, for example about the connection between the Higgs boson and the very early stages of the universe life. In the next years there will be for sure new scientific and technological progress.

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