The group of physicists working on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has just documented a new discovery: the decay of the Higgs boson into fermions, one of the two subgroups of elementary particles that exist in nature . The historic discovery of the particle in 2012 only contemplated its disintegration into bosons, the other group of simple and indivisible particles that make up all matter.
As pointed out by the scientific news agency SINC, the results were presented on November 26 at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). Members of the experiment include Spanish scientists from IFIC, IFAE, IMB and UAM. The data shows for the first time the Higgs boson decaying into two femions of the lepton subtype, with a certainty level of 4 sigma on the 6-point scale used by physicists to determine the precision of a result.
The Higgs boson is the particle discovered last year by the ATLAS and CMS experiments of the Large Hadron Collider , which proves the existence of a new force field in nature, thus certifying the standard model of particle physics formulated in 1970. This force field is responsible for the origin of the mass of elementary particles, which are classified into bosons or fermions depending on whether their spin is integer or half integer.
Scientists hope to obtain with this project much more data on the Higgs boson and other subatomic particles that confirm current theories or redefine the laws of particle physics.
