Higgs 4 lepton
The Sheffield High Energy Physics group is an active participant in the ATLAS experiment, one of the general purpose detectors being built to exploit the exciting physics potential of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. ATLAS has been designed to search for signals that will enable physicists to understand the fundamental laws of nature and in particular the acquisition of mass through the so-called Higgs mechanism. Thus, data from the ATLAS experiment are probing the basic forces that have shaped our Universe since the beginning of time and that will eventually determine its fate.
I played a leading role in direct discovery of the Higgs boson announced in July 2012 by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations. This discovery led to the award of the 2013 Nobel Prize to Peter Higgs and François Englert “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles”.
The main interest of the group is the study of the properties of the Higgs boson via its decays into two Z bosons which in turn each decay into an oppositely charged pair of electrons or muons. These decays are so-called the "golden" channel as they have the lower level of background noise.
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