A Higgs boson without the mess Particle physicists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) hope to discover the Higgs boson amid the froth of particles born from proton-proton collisions. Results in the 19 June Physical Review Letters show that there may be a way to cut through some of that froth. An experiment at Fermilab’s proton-antiproton collider in Illinois has identified a rare process that produces matter from the intense field of the strong nuclear force but leaves the proton and antiproton intact. There’s a chance the same basic interaction could give LHC physicists a cleaner look at the Higgs. A proton is always surrounded by a swarm of ghostly virtual photons and gluons associated with the fields of the electromagnetic and strong nuclear forces. Researchers have predicted that when two protons (or a proton and an antiproton) fly past one another at close range, within about a proton’s diameter, these virtual particle clouds may occasionally interact to create new, real (not virtual) particles. The original protons would merely lose some momentum and separate from the beam. Such an “exclusive” reaction–where the original particles don’t break apart–gives unusually clean data because there are so few particles to detect.

A Higgs boson without the mess

Particle physicists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) hope to discover the Higgs boson amid the froth of particles born from proton-proton collisions. Results in the 19 June Physical Review Letters show that there may be a way to cut through some of that froth. An experiment at Fermilab’s proton-antiproton collider in Illinois has identified a rare process that produces matter from the intense field of the strong nuclear force but leaves the proton and antiproton intact. There’s a chance the same basic interaction could give LHC physicists a cleaner look at the Higgs.

A proton is always surrounded by a swarm of ghostly virtual photons and gluons associated with the fields of the electromagnetic and strong nuclear forces. Researchers have predicted that when two protons (or a proton and an antiproton) fly past one another at close range, within about a proton’s diameter, these virtual particle clouds may occasionally interact to create new, real (not virtual) particles. The original protons would merely lose some momentum and separate from the beam. Such an “exclusive” reaction–where the original particles don’t break apart–gives unusually clean data because there are so few particles to detect.