The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva has produced its first pair of Z bo

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva has produced its first pair of Z bosons, based on data released by the compact muon solenoid (CMS) collaboration. Seeing this first pair is an important step in the giant collider's hunt for the Higgs boson because the generation and analysis of many more such events could provide one of the key signatures of the elusive Higgs. A quartet of muons flying through CMS Believed to provide all particles with mass, the Higgs boson is the last missing piece of the Standard Model of particle physics. The LHC, designed to collide protons into one another at energies of up to 14 TeV, is expected to find the elusive boson – assuming that the Higgs does indeed exist. Evidence for the Higgs will not come as a single observation. Instead, physicists must accumulate data related to the energy distribution of the particles that the Higgs decays into. One of the cleanest such decay signatures is the transformation of the Higgs into two Z bosons – particles that are one of the carriers of the weak nuclear force. The Z bosons then decay into pairs of heavy charged particles known as muons, which leave an unmistakable footprint in a detector such as CMS. Layers of particle sensors Now, the first such event at the LHC has been seen by CMS – one of the collider’s two enormous general-purpose detectors. CMS consists of concentric layers of particle sensors placed inside and around the bore of a 4 T superconducting magnet. Any Z bosons produced by the proton–proton collisions at the centre of the bore are too short-lived to be detected by the surrounding instrumentation. However, the muons last for long enough to travel out from the collision point and traverse all of the detector's inner sensors. They then travel through a number of gas-filled layers revealing their trajectory via the ionization of this gas. Moving charged particles are bent by a magnetic field such that the curvature of the muons’ paths reveals their momentum. The CMS data, obtained in the early hours of 24 September, clearly reveal the tracks of four muons (see figure). And the masses of these muons, grouped into two pairs, result in values for the mass of the... [Excerpted from the archived discussion.] Archived source: https://web.archive.org/web/20101205113403/http://www.spacetimeandtheuniverse.com/general-physics/4589-large-hadron-collider-lhc-cern-geneva-has-produced-its-first-pair-z-bo.html