The Higgs: what is it good for?

In 2012 nearly 50 years of searching culminated in the detection of the Higgs boson, the elementary particle that provided a theoretical mechanism that gives fundamental particles mass. Since its first discovery this object has been the subject of intense study. One of the most important tools in these studies have been the decays of Higgs particle to tau leptons. These decays have provided the first direct evidence of Higgs boson coupling to fermions, placed stringent limits on new theories such as supersymmetry and are now being used to probe the basic properties of the Higgs boson. Other studies of the Higgs decaying to invisible particles have provided probes into dark matter that are complementary to direct searches.

Upon discovery of the Higgs boson the Director General of CERN described the discovery as the culmination of three success stories: the building of a machine to accelerate the colliding particles; the development of the detectors to find it; and the innovating computing to analyse and interpret the data. While the great detectors of CMS and ATLAS and the awesome scale of the LHC ring are well covered in the media, the computational challenges are a lesser-heard story.

David Colling is a Professor of Physics and e-Science at Imperial College London. He has been involved LHC computing since it its inception and has studied the Higgs boson in different ways for more than a decade. In his talk David will describe the Higgs mechanism, the search for the Higgs boson and how the study of the discovered particle can shed light on some of the most basic questions of the universe. He will describe the innovative computational approaches used by the LHC and how the lessons learnt are being used to build infrastructures that will help future generations of big data science.

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