Higgs Boson Decaying to Tau Leptons#
Overview#
From [1], “The Higgs boson is an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics, produced by the quantum excitation of the Higgs field, one of the fields in particle physics theory.It is named after physicist Peter Higgs, who in 1964, along with six other scientists, proposed the mechanism, which suggested the existence of such a particle. Its existence was confirmed by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations based on collisions in the LHC at CERN.
On December 10, 2013, two of the physicists, Peter Higgs and François Englert, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their theoretical predictions. Although Higgs’s name has come to be associated with this theory, several researchers between about 1964 and 1972 independently developed different parts of it.”
The Standard Model (SM) of particle physics predicts the existence of a Higgs boson. It was discovered at CERN in 2012 by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations, with contributions to the data analysis in the discovery paper by Neubauer’s research group at Illinois. See this video for more about the central role that the Higgs boson plays in the standard model of particle physics and Illinois researchers’ role in its discovery.
Data Sources#
Original Source
File URLs
Questions#
Question 01#
What is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)? What is it about the LHC that makes it possible to produce heavy particles like the Higgs boson?
Question 02#
The Higgs boson is the last particle in the SM to be discovered and completes the constituent picture of that theory in the SM. In what way(s) does the Higgs boson play a particularly important role in the SM?
Question 03#
The Higgs boson is unstable and rapidly decays. The Higgs boson has several ways that it can decay (“decay modes”). What are these decay modes and what is decay probability for each? (Obviously not asking for any calculation here, just information from available references).
Question 04#
Briefly describe the ATLAS and CMS experiments that collect proton-proton collision data at the LHC to study the Higgs boson.
The remaining questions refer to the following data source:
https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/machine-learning-databases/00280/HIGGS.csv.gz
Question 05#
What is the size and shape of the data set?
Question 06#
The data has been produced using Monte Carlo simulations. The first 21 features (columns 2-22) are kinematic properties measured by the particle detectors in the LHC accelerator. The last seven features are functions of the first 21 features; these are high-level features derived by physicists to help discriminate between the two classes. When you read through the reference paper [1], what particle properties do those 28 features represent?
Question 07#
Using the data set, Could you draw the histogram of 28 normalized features for signal and background separately? Could you tell the significant differences from these histograms?
References#
[1] P.J. Sadowski, D. Whiteson, P. Baldi, “Searching for Higgs Boson Decay Modes with Deep Learning”, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 27 (NIPS 2014) (https://papers.nips.cc/paper/2014/hash/e1d5be1c7f2f456670de3d53c7b54f4a-Abstract.html)
Acknowledgements#
Initial version: Mark Neubauer
© Copyright 2023