Michael Hauschild

Michael Hauschild
Exploring the Large

Hadron Collider–The
Discovery of the
Higgs Particle
The World Machine Clearly Explained
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Michael Hauschild
Exploring the Large

Hadron Collider—The
Discovery of the Higgs
Particle
The World Machine Clearly Explained
Michael Hauschild
Physics Department, CERN
Geneva, Switzerland
ISSN 2197-6708 ISSN 2197-6716 (electronic)

essentials
ISSN 2731-3107 ISSN 2731-3115 (electronic)
Springer essentials
ISBN 978-3-658-34382-8 ISBN 978-3-658-34383-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-34383-5
This book is a translation of the original German edition „Neustart des LHC: die Entdeckung des
Higgs-Teilchens“ by Hauschild, Michael, published by Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH
in 2018. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation
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What You Can Find in This essential
• Mass does it!—How the particles get their mass

• From UFOs and more!—The LHC goes into the next round
• The plan of the century!—Higgs, what next?
v
Preface
The world machine, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European
Organization for Nuclear Research near Geneva, is the largest particle accelerator
in the world. The first ideas and concepts for the LHC were already made in the
early 1980s. From these beginnings, however, it took more than a quarter of a
century until the LHC was finally completed, a ring-shaped particle accelerator
with a circumference of 27 km, 100 m below ground. When particle beams circu-
lated in the LHC for the first time on September 10, 2008, the excitement among
scientists was boundless. The launch of the LHC with live transmission from the
LHC control room was in the top news media worldwide. The physicists were in
each other’s arms.
Only a few days later, on September 19, 2008, the big disillusionment came:
during a test, one of over 10,000 cable connections could not withstand the high
electric current and melted. No one was hurt, but the LHC was massively dam-
aged and it took more than a year until it was finally possible to resume opera-
tions in November 2009.
In the accident investigations, the cable connections turned out to be a poten-
tial weak point. It would have taken far more than a year to check and repair or
even renew all the connections, so CERN management decided to run the LHC at
half power for the time being to avoid overloading the connections.
But even half the energy was enough to announce the discovery of a new ele-
mentary particle on July 4, 2012 with the two large particle detectors ATLAS and
CMS. And the LHC continued to run. In March 2013, the physicists from ATLAS
and CMS were finally certain that the newly discovered particle was indeed the
long-sought Higgs particle.
More than 50 years ago, in 1964, theoretical physicists Robert Brout, François
Englert, and Peter Higgs, among others, published ideas on how elementary
vii
viii Preface
particles can acquire mass, that is, become heavy, and one consequence of their
theories is the existence of a new particle, the Higgs particle, named after Peter
Higgs. This particle was searched for at various particle accelerators and detec-
tors around the world until the physicists finally found it at the LHC. Brout had
already died in 2011 and could not live to see the triumph, but Englert and Higgs
were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in autumn 2013 with great jubilation
and the sympathy of the physicists involved at CERN.
But this is not the end of research at the LHC, it is only the beginning. The
newly discovered Higgs particle must be measured, its properties determined and
compared with the theoretical predictions. Other new particles may be waiting to
be found in the next few years, and each newly discovered particle could trigger a
revolution in our understanding of the world and the universe.
In 2013 and 2014, the LHC and the particle detectors have been made fit for
the new challenges. The 2-year break was used to eliminate all weak points in the
cable connections, install new security systems and improve the detectors in order
to discover even more of nature’s secrets with higher energy.
As more than 6 years earlier, the first circulating particle beams were eagerly
awaited in March 2015 when the LHC was put back into operation. Two months
later, on June 3, 2015, the first collisions took place with almost twice the energy
as before: 13 TeV, comparable to the energy of two colliding mosquitoes, but
highly concentrated on two tiny particles, and once again a new world record.
The world machine is running again! In the coming years, particle physicists
will look more intensively than ever before into their collected data from count-
less collisions to see if there are any indications of new particles and new phe-
nomena beyond the so-called Standard Model.
This essential is part of a series on the restart of the LHC in spring 2015. You
will follow how the initially bumpy start of the LHC was followed by the discov-
ery of a new particle, the long-sought Higgs boson. The restart at higher energy
and the prospects for future projects conclude this essential.
In other essentials of this series you will learn more about the beginnings of
CERN, one of the most fascinating research centers of all, its history, its people, and
its accelerators. You will learn about the operation of particle accelerators and how the
first ideas were used to build the LHC, today’s world machine. You will learn about
the experiments at the LHC, how particle detectors work, the theory behind the Higgs
and the Standard Model, and the theoretical approaches beyond the Standard Model.
Michael Hauschild
CERN, Geneva
Contents
1 The Discovery of a New Particle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

1.1 The Origin of Mass—The Field and the Particle. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.2 Higgs Hunting—Before the LHC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.3 Statistics is Everything. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1.4 Is it a Higgs?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
1.5 The Nobel Prize. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
2 The Restart . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
2.1 A Long Stop. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
2.2 The First Beam. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
2.3 UFOs in the LHC. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
2.4 A New World Record. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
3 The Plan of the Century. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
3.1 LHC, the Second . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
3.2 Bigger, Faster, Further—Future Projects. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
4 Outlook. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
ix
The Discovery of a New Particle
1
In the late 1950s and even more so in the early 1960s, new particles were discov-
ered almost monthly. This was the birth of the Standard Model of particle phys-
ics, which, like the periodic table of the chemical elements, brought order to the
particle zoo, which had previously been growing in number. The Standard Model
made it possible to trace the diversity of particles back to only a few elementary
particles, which, like the chemical elements, could form the most diverse bonds
and combinations. This also raised the question of how the mass of the elemen-
tary particles came about. Although all the elementary particles in the Standard
Model could be described excellently in theory, they were initially all massless in
theory. A yet unknown additional mechanism had to take care of for their mass.
As is so often the case in the sciences, there were several theoretical physicists
who came up with a solution to the mass problem almost simultaneously and inde-
pendently of each other, and who in turn built on preliminary work by others. In
1960, the Japanese Yoichiro Nambu (1921–2015) was actually working on a com-
pletely different branch of physics, superconductivity, but in doing so he discov-
ered a phenomenon that would eventually become decisive for particle physics.
Solid-state bodies usually have a very regular structure: the atoms are arranged
in a crystal lattice and exhibit certain symmetries, which manifest themselves
particularly beautifully in snow crystals and countless crystal shapes and types,
much sought after by collectors. Under certain circumstances, however, the inter-
nal symmetry is disturbed, for example, when the tiny elementary magnets in a
piece of iron are uniformly aligned by an external magnetic field. The formation
of a preferred direction by the magnetic field causes a so-called spontaneous sym-
metry breaking. Nambu and, 2 years later, the British theorist Jeffrey Goldstone
were able to show that waves are created in the iron as a result of small oscillations
of the elementary magnets. And since in the microscopic quantum world waves
© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2021 1

M. Hauschild, Exploring the Large Hadron Collider—The Discovery of the
Higgs Particle, essentials, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-34383-5_1
2 1 The Discovery of a New Particle
can also behave like particles and vice versa, in the case of spontaneous symmetry
breaking, the waves are also associated with a particle which, as it turned out, has
no angular momentum (spin-0) and thus has the properties of a boson.1
Spin-0 bosons can, therefore, occur in cases of spontaneous symmetry break-
ing, but the bosons of Nambu and Goldstone themselves were still massless. Only
1 year later, however, the US physicist Philip Anderson was able to show that
under certain circumstances massive spin-0 bosons can also occur in supercon-
ductors. Now only a small step was missing to apply these findings of solid-state
physics to particle physics. Free elementary particles often move at relativistic
velocities, whereas this is not the case in solids. The small, still missing step was
to extend the theories from nonrelativistic solid-state physics to relativistic parti-
cles. This was achieved independently in 1964 by the British Peter Higgs and the
two Belgians François Englert and Robert Brout (1928–2011).
In July and August 1964, almost at the same time as Englert and Brout, Higgs
submitted two publications [1, 2] to two renowned journals. The reviewer of the
second publication, Yoichiro Nambu himself as later turned out, pointed out to
Higgs that shortly before that time Englert and Brout had also published a paper [3]
on the subject, which Higgs was not yet aware of. He asked him to revise his man-
uscript and point out the connection of his work to the publication of Englert and
Brout. Higgs then added a short section in which he pointed to the appearance of a
new massive spin-0 boson as a consequence of his theory. This initially hypotheti-
cal boson would later be called the Higgs boson or Higgs particle after Peter Higgs.
1.1 The Origin of Mass—The Field and the Particle
But how can the mechanism that Higgs, Englert, and Brout had devised allow mas-
sive particles to form at all? And what role does the Higgs particle play in this?
Imagine our universe: big, wide, with billions of galaxies, but huge voids in
between. And yet the vacuum between stars and galaxies is not completely empty
and without any energy. Amazingly, an empty vacuum does not exist. Rather, it
is filled with virtual particles that are created for a short time and then disappear
again, but also with different fields. Among them are proponents familiar to us,
such as magnetic fields or electric fields, which can exert forces as if by magic
and without any visible mechanical connection, bridging space, and moving mag-
netic or electrically charged objects.
1 See also the section “Interactions” of the essential “Exploring the Large Hadron Col-
lider—CERN and the accelerators”.
1.1 The Origin of Mass—The Field and the Particle 3
Also at Higgs, Englert, and Brout a field plays the decisive role. This field fills
the entire universe, at the furthest distance as well as on earth and within ourselves,
and is called the Brout-Englert-Higgs field or BEH field for short in honor of the
three theoretical physicists. The vacuum is therefore never empty, but has a certain
inherent energy, the so-called vacuum energy, due to the presence of the field.
The particles in our universe have to move through the omnipresent BEH
field, which cannot be shielded as is possible with magnetic and electric fields
and which affects the particles in different ways: photons, the particles of light,
do not feel the field at all and move unhindered through the universe at the speed
of light. Other particles are affected by the field: the initially massless particles of
the Standard Model can no longer move at the speed of light due to the constant
interaction with the BEH field. This gives them mass, because according to spe-
cial relativity, massless particles always move at the speed of light, while massive
particles always move slower. This is the cause of the inertial mass2 of elementary
particles. The stronger the interaction with the Higgs field, the greater the mass.
So it is the Brout-Englert-Higgs field that gives most of the elementary parti-
cles of the Standard Model their mass, except the photon and the gluons. But how
can this theory be verified? The BEH field is omnipresent but cannot be measured
directly. Peter Higgs’ prediction that the field is also associated with the appear-
ance of a massive particle, a boson with spin-0, helps. We can imagine the BEH
field as the surface of a calm lake in which we can see ourselves. Now we cause
a disturbance and throw a stone into the lake: the water splashes on and waves
spread out in a ring from the impact point. The resulting water splash corresponds
to a particle created by the excitation of the field. After a short time the water col-
umn collapses, the water calms down again and after a while the water surface is
as calm as before.
Such excitation of the BEH field can be achieved with an accelerator like
the LHC: by colliding the protons, we pump energy into the field and excite it,
so a particle manifests itself. Like the lake’s water column, however, the Higgs
particle is only a brief, ephemeral phenomenon, since it is unstable and decays
before it can reach one of the LHC’s particle detectors. However, its decay prod-
ucts can be captured and measured, allowing us to deduce the Higgs particle
2 The inertial mass m is the mass to which a force is applied due to a change in speed,
i
i.e. acceleration: F = mi · a. The gravitational mass mg is the mass on which a force (grav-
m ·m
ity) is exerted due to the attraction of (gravitational) masses to each other: F = G · g,1r 2 g,2 .
In general, the inertial mass is equated to the gravitational mass and is not further distin-
guished: mi = mg = m.
from the measured energies and momentum and to determine3 its rest mass. The
experimental proof of the Higgs particle thus simultaneously confirms the under-
lying theory of the mechanism for generating mass.
1.2 Higgs Hunting—Before the LHC
Predicting the occurrence of a new phenomenon or a new particle associated with

a new theory allows experimental physicists to reinforce or disprove the theory
if the prediction is not confirmed. Unfortunately, in the theory of Brout, Englert,
and Higgs, there is an unknown quantity, a free parameter of the theory, which is
not fixed and makes the search more difficult. This free parameter is, of all things,
the mass of the Higgs particle itself, which could be both in the range of only a
few GeV or very large, up to one TeV. Where should one search?
Prior to the search for the Higgs particle, the 1970s and 1980s initially focused
on the other components of the Standard Model, the quarks, leptons, and force
carriers of the strong and weak interactions. In rapid succession, the charm quark
(4th quark) was discovered in 1974, the tau lepton in 1975, and the bottom quark
(5th quark) in 1977. In 1979, the gluon at DESY in Hamburg and in 1983 the
W and Z0 bosons at CERN were4 added to the list, with the first Nobel Prize for
CERN scientists. With the exception of the very heavy top quark (6th quark),
which was only found in 1995, and the extremely difficult to detect tau neutrino,
which was discovered in 2000, almost all the matter particles of the Standard
Model and the force carriers were known by the early 1980s. But there was no
trace of the Higgs particle. The data only indicated that it must be heavier than 8
or 9 GeV.
Since the Higgs particle is very short-lived and decays quickly, it is also not
easy to find like the proverbial needle in a haystack. The particle must first be
produced by the excitation of the Brout-Englert-Higgs field before the decay
3 The rest mass m of a particle is constant in all reference systems and is also called invar-
iant mass in relativistic kinematics. When the particle decays, the invariant mass of the
system of decaying particles is conserved and can be calculated from the energies and
momentums of the daughter particles when the particle decays into two daughter particles:
m2 = (E1 + E2 )2 − |�p1 + p� 2 |2 = m12 + m22 + 2(E1 E2 − p
�1p� 2 ).
4 More on this in the essential “Exploring the Large Hadron Collider—CERN and the
accelerators”.
1.2 Higgs Hunting—Before the LHC 5
products can be found in a particle detector. The production of the particle

requires some energy, because only by converting energy into matter, which Ein-
stein first wrote down in 1905 in his world-famous formula E = mc2, can its mass
be produced. If the collision energy of an accelerator is not sufficient, no Higgs
particles are created and any search for them is in vain.
Obviously, the accelerators were not capable of producing the required energy
until the end of the 1980s, when a new chapter in the hunt for the Higgs particle
was once again opened at CERN. On July 14, 1989, the French national day and
200th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille with the beginning of the French
Revolution, electrons and positrons circled for the first time in the Large Electron
Positron Collider (LEP), the predecessor of the LHC, in the same tunnel, and just
1 month later the electrons and positrons collided at an energy of a about 45 GeV
per beam.
As later at the LHC, there were four large particle detectors in underground
caverns: ALEPH, DELPHI, L3, and OPAL, which recorded the collisions.
Although not yet of the size of today’s collaborations at the LHC, the groups
of 300–500 particle physicists each represented a new order of magnitude. LEP
was the first serious attempt to search for the Higgs particle in a targeted manner
and with high priority. But even after years of searching with a steady increase
in beam energy by more than twice the amount, there were no indications of any
decay products whose invariant masses piled up suspiciously at a certain mass.
The end of LEP had already been decided when, a few months before the planned
end in summer 2000, rumours about some collision events in the ALEPH detector
that could point to a Higgs particle spread. The accelerator physicists had previously
managed to increase the collision energy more and more, and perhaps the thresh-
old for generating the Higgs particle had finally been reached. When LEP was shut
down as planned on November 2, 2000, the decision was still open as to whether the
accelerator and detectors would continue to operate for another year. The most absurd
ideas were conceived and scribbled on the paper sheets in the restaurants in order to
increase the energy once again and get the last ounce of energy out of the accelerator,
because that would have massively increased the chances of a discovery.
The particle physicists eagerly awaited a special seminar just one day after
LEP was shut down. But the results were unclear: of the four detectors, only
ALEPH had recorded collisions that were compatible with a Higgs particle with a
mass of about 115 GeV. The three other detectors did not find any such collisions.
The LEPC, the scientific committee that reviewed the results, was also divided,
and just a few days later the advisory committee of CERN’s Director General
was unable to reach a recommendation. In the end, the CERN Board of Directors
under Luciano Maiani, the then Director General, decided against continuing LEP
and in favor of rapid progress in the construction of the LHC, for which the first
construction work had already begun 2 years earlier. Maiani did not want to risk
any delays and thus possible cost increases for the LHC. The physicists of all four
LEP experiments reacted in shock, as they were on the verge of the supposed dis-
covery of the Higgs particle. As a result of the search, they could only conclude
that the Higgs particle must be heavier than 114.4 GeV.
Through precision measurements of various other processes in which the
influence of the Higgs particle is indirectly revealed, it has even been possible to
specify an upper limit of 154 GeV for the mass after years of laborious data eval-
uation. As we know today, the mass of the Higgs particle at 125 GeV is exactly
in the range predicted at LEP, a triumph of the interplay of the scientific art of
experimentation and theory.5
In the end, the decision to shut down LEP turned out to be the right one, but
in the emotional atmosphere of November 2000 Luciano Maiani had made no
friends among the physicists of the four collaborations at LEP. Only a short time
later, in September 2001, Maiani also had to announce a substantial cost increase
of 850 million Swiss francs for the construction of the LHC, which he had con-
cealed for months. CERN’s member countries reacted angrily, called for strict
cost control and set up an external committee to make proposals for savings. The
shockwaves of the cost increase lasted for a long time and had a major impact on
budget and planning for the years to come.
However, before the LHC was finally completed in 2008, the ball was in the
court of US physicists. After the end of LEP, the Higgs particle search for the
next 10 years shifted to the Tevatron accelerator at the Fermi National Acceler-
ator Laboratory (Fermilab), about 50 km west of Chicago. The Tevatron was a
collider for protons and antiprotons, similar to the super proton synchroton (SPS)
in the 1980s at CERN, but with a three times higher collision energy of up to
1.96 TeV thanks to superconducting magnets, as was later the case at the LHC.
The Tevatron had already been in operation for more than 10 years and had cele-
brated great successes, such as the discovery of the top quark in 1995, but for the
discovery of the Higgs particle, in addition to the necessary collision energy, a
sufficiently high collision rate was crucial. Even if the energy to generate Higgs
particles were sufficient, the expected number was initially too small to be identi-
fied with certainty among the millions of other collisions.
5 Similarly,in the nineteenth century, deviations in the expected orbit of the planet Uranus
were used to infer the existence and mass of another planet. Not far from the predicted
location, Neptune was then discovered in 1846.
1.3 Statistics is Everything 7
A higher collision rate was necessary and, as with the SPS collider at CERN,
a sufficiently large number of antiprotons had to be filled into the Tevatron.
Although this succeeded better and better over the years, the collision rate and
amount of data were still not sufficient to find the Higgs particle in the mass range
predicted by LEP until the start of the LHC in 2008. An accumulation of events in
the range between 115 and 140 GeV showed that they were on the right track, but
with a statistical significance that was not sufficient for a discovery. After 24 years
of operation, the Tevatron was therefore shut down in September 2011, when the
LHC was about to break new records in the collision rate achieved.
1.3 Statistics is Everything
More than 10 years after the end of LEP, CERN again took the lead in the search
for the Higgs particle with the LHC. However, after the incredible worldwide
euphoria of the first beam on September 10, 2008 and the deep depression result-
ing from the accident just a few days later, the LHC initially had a difficult start.
It took more than a year to repair all the damage, install the new sensitive mon-
itoring system and some of the new safety valves to prevent a repeat of such an
accident.
In November 2009, the agony was over and, after more than a year, protons
were again circulating in the LHC, this time with far less attention from the
media and the world public. Just 3 days later, on November 23, 2009, hundreds of
physicists in the control rooms of the four large LHC detectors stared at the rows
of countless screens and awaited the first collisions with high suspense. What
took another 4 weeks at LEP has now been accomplished in record time, thanks
to years of preparation. Two particle bunches, each containing 10 billion pro-
tons, which initially circled separately in the two vacuum tubes of the LHC, were
slowly steered toward each other at the center of ATLAS and CMS. The physi-
cists looked spellbound at the displays and were able to follow immediately how
the two beams approached and finally collided head-on. At the same moment, the
detectors registered the first collisions and the first tracks appeared on the screens,
which left their energy in the calorimeters further out. Frenetic cheering broke
out. This was the moment for which the physicists had worked so many years,
sometimes decades, and for which they had built the detectors with their gigantic
dimensions. The tension was released with unaccustomed emotions.
But no sooner had the first collisions been recorded than the physicists were
back at their control screens: now they finally had data. Would the detector work
as expected? With the hoped-for precision? Were corrections necessary? Did data
processing cope with the sudden amount of data? The collision rate was still very
low compared to what was to follow. Nor was the LHC yet a real accelerator,
because the protons delivered by the last pre-accelerator, the SPS, and injected
into the LHC initially remained at the injection energy of 450 GeV, less than half
the energy of the Tevatron.
However, a new world record was not long in coming. Just 1 week after the
first collisions, the first 1.05 TeV and shortly afterward even 1.18 TeV per beam
were achieved, more than the old record of 0.98 TeV set by the Tevatron. The
baton was back in Europe. And it went on: in March 2010 after the winter break
the first collisions were achieved at a beam energy of 3.5 TeV. This was finally
the beginning of a new age in particle physics. This energy should be sufficient
for the Higgs particle, if it existed at all.
For if the mechanism with its field and the Higgs particle, which was invented
by Brout, Englert, and Higgs, was not realized in nature and its existence could
even be ruled out by the LHC, there must be something else that is responsible for
the mass of the elementary particles. Then, it was certain that the LHC would dis-
cover something else beyond the existing Standard Model of particle physics and
this would even be a greater success. But data was needed, lots of data from many
collisions, and in 2010 the LHC delivered enough energy but very few c ollisions.
Why is a sufficiently high number of collisions so important? We have to keep
in mind that by far the most frequent processes at the LHC are ordinary, long-
known interactions between the known particles of the Standard Model. Only
one in 10 billion collisions will result in a Higgs particle, which then has to be
detected via its decay products in the large LHC detectors. This is much more
rare than the proverbial needle in a haystack, which consists of only 40 million
stalks.6 Finding a needle in a haystack is also comparatively easy, because the
needle differs significantly from the usual stalks. Even if the search takes a long
time, at some point the one needle hidden in the haystack will come to light.
This is different with the Higgs particle search: Higgs particles can only be
detected via the invariant mass of the decay particles, and unfortunately in the
many collisions relevant to the Higgs hunt there are also a large number of ran-
dom combinations of particles whose invariant mass corresponds exactly to that
of a Higgs particle. This so-called background cannot be distinguished from a
real Higgs particle decay, and can be much larger than the signal of the Higgs
particle itself. The background corresponds to the noise of a radio or television
6A nice determination of the number of stems in a haystack was carried out by Martin
Lieberherr, Zurich and his students [4].
1.3 Statistics is Everything 9
station that can only be received very faintly, although in the age of digital radio
and television this is a phenomenon that is only rarely noticed.
A Higgs particle reveals itself by a small accumulation of decay particles at a
certain invariant mass. However, a random fluctuation of the background can also
lead to an accumulation that cannot be distinguished from a real signal at first.
Only when a sufficiently large amount of data is available would the random fluc-
tuations cancel each other out more and more and the signal of the Higgs particle
becomes visible. But how large must the amount of data be in order to be sure
that a new particle has really been discovered and that no random fluctuations in
the background have occurred?
Coincidences can also be calculated, or at least the probabilities with which
certain random events occur, such as the frequency of dice rolls or the probabil-
ity of a hit on the lottery. Especially with the advent of the roulette game in the
nineteenth century, probability theory received a considerable boost and also in
physics more and more phenomena were described with methods of probability
theory and statistics, such as the thermodynamics of gases based on the statistical
velocity distribution of the gas molecules.
Random processes such as body height, school grades or the scattering of
measured values often follow a Gaussian normal distribution according to the
German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855): many values are close
to a mean value, but some values are sometimes significantly higher or lower, just
as there are many people of medium height, but only a few are very tall or very
short. Characteristic for the bell-shaped normal distribution is, besides the mean
value, the width of the distribution, also called sigma σ . Within an interval of
±1σ around the mean value there are 68.3% of all values, outside of it there are
31.7%. Only 4.55% of the values are outside an interval of ±2σ and only 0.27%
outside of ±3σ. According to a 2010 study [5], height follows a normal distri-
bution very well. The mean height of German men7 is 177.7 cm with a sigma of
6.69 cm. This means that only 0.135% or one in 740 men is taller than 197 cm
and an equally small proportion is shorter than 158 cm.
Also the variation of the background of the invariant masses follows approxi-
mately a normal distribution.8 An accumulation of the invariant mass at a certain
point, which corresponds to a deviation of 3σ above the mean value, can therefore
either indicate a new particle or, with a probability of 1:740, have been caused by a
7 For
women the average height is 165.1 cm with a sigma of 6.20 cm.
8 Strictly
speaking, the background follows a Poisson distribution, but for large values it
changes to a normal distribution.
random fluctuation of the background. In the package inserts of drugs, the occur-
rence of side effects with a frequency of between 1:100 and 1:1000 is described as
occasional. Would you announce a new discovery if it could happen occasionally
by pure chance? More than that, the random deviation of 3σ could occur not only at
a specific point in the distribution but at any point in the distribution. With 100 data
points in a distribution, there are therefore many more ways for chance to deceive
you, which quickly brings9 the chance of a false discovery into the frequent range.
A deviation from 3σ is therefore not enough for a discovery, even 4σ are still
too few, although the excitement will then increase significantly. In order to have
a discovery “beyond a reasonable doubt”, the physicists have therefore agreed to
speak of a discovery only if the deviation of the background would need to be at
least 5σ above the mean value, corresponding to a negligible chance of only 1:3.5
million that the deviation is due to random fluctuation.
1.4 Is it a Higgs?
In 2010, the collision rate at the LHC was not yet sufficient to produce even a
few Higgs particles. The focus was rather on testing the complex detectors, their
monitoring, data readout and storage, and the entire chain of data analysis. In the
course of that process, the familiar world of elementary particles of the Stand-
ard Model was rediscovered, and all the discoveries of the last decades appeared
in the detectors in quick succession: from the charm and bottom quarks of the
1970s, the W and Z0 bosons of the 1980s to the last major discovery of the top
quark in the 1990s. The very precisely known mass of the Z0 boson, which had
already been determined with the highest precision at the LEP collider more than
15 years earlier, could be used as a reference value for calibrating the detectors.
In 2011, the actual Higgs hunting finally began in the best possible way, with
accelerator physicists increasing the number of particle bunches in the LHC,
the number of protons per bunch and the focusing of the bunches at the colli-
sion points, in order to increase the density of the protons and thus the probability
of collision. By the time data collection was provisionally completed in Octo-
ber 2011, the two ATLAS and CMS detectors, focused on the Higgs search, had
collected more than a hundred times as much collision data as the year before.
Whether these data sets already contained first hints of the Higgs particle should
soon become apparent.
9 Thisis the so-called look-elsewhere effect: with a sufficient number of data points, random
deviations will occur for purely statistical reasons, but these are by no means a discovery.
1.4 Is it a Higgs? 11
A few weeks later, on December 13, 2011 during the week of the CERN Coun-
cil meeting, a special seminar was scheduled at which the speakers from ATLAS
and CMS presented the first results. And there were very interesting things to
report: Both collaborations could largely rule out the existence of a Higgs particle
with a high mass. In the theory of Brout, Englert, and Higgs [6], the mass of the
Higgs particle is an initially unknown free parameter. However, if a certain mass is
assumed, it is easy to calculate how many Higgs particles should have been found.
Therefore, the mass range above 130 GeV and up to 600 GeV could be excluded,
as otherwise there would have been clear signatures in the detectors.
However, in the area of low masses a gap opened up that could not be closed.
Between 116 and 127 GeV, both ATLAS and CMS had an accumulation of col-
lisions above the background that were compatible with a Higgs particle. This
was precisely the mass range in which the Higgs particle was suspected at LEP
as early as the 1990s, based on direct measurements and indirectly on precision
measurements of various other processes. It fit! It was still too early to talk of
a discovery, because the maximum significance of the accumulation was only
3.6σ at a mass of 126 GeV for ATLAS and only 2.6σ at 124 GeV for CMS. The
look-elsewhere effect further reduced the significance to only 2.3σ and 1.9σ ,
which is far too little for a sensation. It was still necessary to wait and hope that
the LHC would also provide enough or even more data in 2012 than in 2011.
After the winter break, the LHC started up again in April 2012, even with a col-
lision energy of 8 TeV, which is 1 TeV higher. The accelerator physicists and engi-
neers had decided to increase the energy after the good operating experience of the
previous year and after many tests and risk assessments. The risk of a malfunction
in the electrical connections between the magnets was only slightly higher, but the
higher collision energy of now 2 × 4 TeV instead of 2 × 3.5 TeV caused a produc-
tion rate of Higgs particles that was almost 30% higher. The collision rate, which was
also twice as high as in 2011, meant that by mid-June, just over 2 months later, more
data could be collected than in the whole of 2011. The physicists were on track!
The most important and prestigious conference of the year, the International
Conference for High Energy Physics (ICHEP), was to be held in Melbourne
(Australia) from July 4th to 11th, 2012. There, the interim results of the Higgs
hunting were to be presented and perhaps even the discovery of the Higgs parti-
cle was to be announced, which would have particularly pleased the conference
organizers. The schedule of the LHC had been adjusted in coordination with
ATLAS and CMS to exactly to that conference in early July 2012. The deadline
was June 19, about 2 weeks before the start of the conference. All data from the
detectors recorded up to that date could still be taken into account. This was only
possible because the chain of analysis was continuously refined and automated,
just like a well-running production plant. At the end of the chain, all that was
left was the data from the few suspicious collisions that had possibly produced a
Higgs particle.
By the deadline, however, even the physicists from ATLAS and CMS were
still unable to see whether the Higgs particle had caught in the net. It was only
at this point that the new data were disclosed and, in particular, compared with
those of 2011. And it fit! As in the previous year, an increased number of collision
events occurred at a mass of 125 GeV, and this also showed up in different signa-
tures in the detector, since the Higgs particle can decay in different ways. That’s
it! Over the next days and nights, data was checked again and again for possi-
ble errors and the various partial results were combined. The exciting question
remained, whether the significance also reached the magic 5σ for a discovery?
And were the physicists confident enough to announce a discovery, after all of the
most important particle to be discovered for decades?
On June 22nd, the CERN Director General, Rolf Heuer, and the Director of
Research, Sergio Bertolucci, asked the two spokespersons for ATLAS and CMS,
Fabiola Gianotti and Joe Incandela, to meet in confidence to exchange informa-
tion and agree on how to proceed. This was the first time that the results were
on the table together. The speakers, who now also knew the results of the other
collaboration, agreed to keep silence in their own collaboration. This was also
important in order not to influence the data analysis, because the human factor
also plays a role for physicists. Thus, for example, it is quite possible, through an
appropriate, highly restrictive choice of selection criteria, to create an accumula-
tion of more “desired” events than are actually present. This conscious or uncon-
scious bias is a notorious effect among particle physicists and knowledge of the
results of the other collaboration could have done just that.
The format of the presentation of the results was also clarified: the CERN
Council demanded that any discovery should be announced at the same time as
the start of the ICHEP conference, but in any case at CERN and not on the other
side of the globe. A special seminar was planned at CERN, which would also be
broadcast to Melbourne, followed by a press conference. The exact language used
to comment on the results, especially in the press release, required further close
coordination between the two collaborations and CERN management.
Finally, the special seminar with the innocuous title Latest update in the
search for the Higgs boson [7] was announced for July 4, 2012. It was clear
that a historic moment was approaching. The seminar was to begin at 9 a.m.
in the morning, but many hours earlier a queue of more than a hundred meters
had begun to form, stretching from the terrace of Restaurant 1 up the stairs to
the auditorium, in the vague hope of securing some of the few free seats. It was
like the first performance of a Hollywood blockbuster or the first sale of a new
trendy smartphone. Those who had got in line in time or even spent the night
outside the auditorium doors suddenly found themselves in the same room next to
François Englert and Peter Higgs (see Fig. 1.1), who were now meeting in person
for the first time ever at CERN. Robert Brout, the third theorist associated with
the Brout-Englert-Higgs field, had unfortunately already died in 2011.
The seminar started with a short introduction by the Director General, who also
welcomed the participants of the ICHEP conference in Melbourne. The order of the
following two presentations had been decided beforehand and so first Joe Incandela
had the opportunity to present the results of the CMS Collaboration. First of all,
technical details on the detector’s functionality and data analysis were explained
before, after more than 20 long minutes, a mass distribution appeared for the first
time in which an accumulation at 125 GeV was clearly visible (see Fig. 1.2). A
murmur caught the audience and the CMS speaker had to pause briefly in this emo-
tional moment before continuing. Shortly afterward, further signs of the Higgs par-
ticle in a different decay mode could be seen and the first images of the suspected
Higgs particle decays in the CMS detector (see Fig. 1.3). When the red-framed
magic number of 5.0σ significance finally appeared on the screen, spontaneous
applause and cheers broke out. After combining all the data, the speaker finally
summarized that CMS had observed a new boson with a mass of 125.3 GeV.
Fig. 1.1 François Englert and Peter Higgs (right) at the seminar on July 4, 2012. (© 2012
CERN)
Fig. 1.2 Mass distribution of two photons measured in the CMS detector. On the declin-
ing curve, an accumulation at a mass of 125 GeV can be seen, which is caused by a new
particle (seminar on July 4, 2012). (© 2013 CERN, for the benefit of the CMS Collabora-
tion)
Now it was the turn of Fabiola Gianotti for ATLAS. Would ATLAS also see
an accumulation of similar significance at the same mass? And even there, as had
not been expected otherwise, there were strong indications that the decay prod-
ucts of the Higgs particle had been observed in the detector, as several images
again impressively demonstrated (see Fig. 1.4). When the decisive number finally
appeared on ATLAS, again a significance of 5.0σ at a mass of 126.5 GeV, the
cheers were even greater than shortly before on CMS. Because it was clear: both
collaborations had reached the threshold of discovery! In the end, Rolf Heuer,
the Director General summed up in short, memorable words what everyone was
thinking: “As a layman I now would say: I think, we have it—we have a discov-
ery!”.
Fig. 1.3 Collision of two protons at the center of the CMS detector at an energy of 8 TeV.
In addition to many other particle tracks, the image shows two characteristic high-energy
photons, recognizable by the two protruding blocks, as they are typically created during the
decay of a Higgs particle. (© 2013 CERN, for the benefit of the CMS Collaboration)
Then the microphone went first to François Englert and then to Peter Higgs,
who, with tears in his eyes, said that it was truly incredible that this was hap-
pening in his life. In fact, the Higgs particle, named after Peter Higgs, now filled
the last remaining gap in the Standard Model of elementary particle physics. This
was one of mankind’s “Decisive Moments in History”, as the writer Stefan Zweig
had called his collection of historical events, which in his opinion have influenced
mankind in various ways. Like a pop star, surrounded by a bunch of journalists
and hindered in his progress, similar to the initially massless elementary particles
in the BEH field, Peter Higgs fought his way to his place at the subsequent press
conference in front of almost one hundred press and media representatives. And
as with the LHC launch 4 years earlier, the news of the discovery at CERN filled
the headlines and top news.
Fig. 1.4 Collision of two protons at the center of the ATLAS detector at an energy of
8 TeV. In addition to many other particles, the image shows four characteristic tracks of
muons running outward from the center, as is typical for the decay of a Higgs particle. The
different views show the tracks very close to the collision point (top left), in the central part
of the detector (right) and in the entire detector. (ATLAS Experiment © 2012 CERN)
1.5 The Nobel Prize
But what had actually been discovered? Everything fitted to a Higgs particle and
yet one was cautious at first and spoke at first of a new, then of a Higgs-like par-
ticle. The properties of the new particle had to be determined more precisely and
compared with the theoretical predictions before one could be sure that the parti-
cle postulated by Peter Higgs in 1964 had really been discovered. Especially the
spin of the new particle had to be determined. If it really was a spin-0 particle,
the last doubts would have been dispelled. But if it was a particle with a spin-2,
and this was also possible due to the measured decays, it would be a completely
1.5 The Nobel Prize 17
different particle, which might even be much more interesting than the Higgs par-
ticle itself.10
The seminar on July 4, 2012 could therefore not yet provide the final answer.
However, by the end of 2012, when the first long data collection period at the
LHC ended after 3 years, more than three times as much data had been collected
as until the seminar in July. This was also sufficient to determine the spin of the
new particle. In March 2013, ATLAS and CMS unanimously announced that it
had to be a spin-0 particle. From now on, the new particle could be called a Higgs
particle without any doubt.
The fame did not take long to arrive. The next Nobel Prize in Physics [8]
was to be awarded on October 8, 2013, and it was highly probable that François
Englert and Peter Higgs would be honored for their theory of the BEH mech-
anism, which they established almost 50 years ago and which has now been
confirmed with the discovery of the Higgs particle. Hundreds of physicists from
ATLAS and CMS gathered at CERN and watched the Nobel Prize Committee
press conference live from Stockholm. The announcement was scheduled for
11.50 a.m. shortly before noon, the countdown from Sweden was running down
on the screens, but… nothing happened. Again and again the announcement was
postponed until finally after an hour the chairman of the committee announced
the two prize winners, as expected Englert and Higgs. The delay was due to the
fact that Peter Higgs, rather a shy and reserved personality who does not like big
appearances, could not be reached by the Nobel Prize Committee shortly before
the official announcement.
Once again the physicists were completely in heaven. Although the Nobel Prize
Committee had not awarded prizes to CERN, the LHC and the ATLAS and CMS
collaborations, in its statement it clearly referred to the discovery of the Higgs par-
ticle, the decisive confirmation of the theory. The rules of the Nobel Prize in Phys-
ics stipulate that only a maximum of three people can be awarded for their own
work. It is not intended to be awarded to an institution, a collaboration, or even to
its director and spokesperson on behalf of an institution. Nevertheless, the many
thousands involved in CERN, the LHC, and the ATLAS and CMS collaborations
felt as if they themselves had received a small part of the Nobel Prize.
10 The total spin of the system before and after decay must be maintained. Since the new
particle decays into two photons, each with spin-1, it can itself either have spin-0 (the spins
of both photons after decay are opposite and compensate to zero) or spin-2 (the spins of
both photons after decay point into the same direction and add up).
The Restart
2
When the Nobel Prize was awarded to Englert and Higgs in December 2013, the
LHC had not been in operation for almost a year. As already planned in 2009, the
accelerator was to be thoroughly overhauled after the first long data acquisition
period and be ready for the originally planned 2 × 7 TeV collision energy, which
was initially out of the question after the accident in September 2008.
2.1 A Long Stop
Long Shutdown 1 was to last two long years until early 2015, when not only the
LHC itself but also the other accelerators at CERN came to a standstill. Since the
LHC was to be operated in future years not only with higher energy but also with
higher intensity, the LHC’s pre-accelerators also had to deliver more protons.
In view of the then higher radiation exposure, the radiation protection shielding
of the proton synchrotron (PS) was reinforced and the cables of the super pro-
ton synchrotron (SPS) were replaced, which had already been damaged in some
places by years of operation.
The main work, however, concerned the elimination of the weaknesses of the
LHC. About 30% of the power connections were completely renewed, whose
resistance had in some cases significantly exceeded the setpoint of only 0.2 n.
With the connections lying outside the tolerance range, operation at high cur-
rents and energies would not have been possible. In addition, all current connec-
tions between the magnets were reinforced by additional copper bridging. This
increases conductivity in the event of a quench, where superconductivity breaks
down and the high current in the connections has to be taken over by the normal
state conducting copper for a short time.

20 2 The Restart
The monitoring and security systems have also been improved. The aim is to
detect a weak point in the magnets or the connections at an early stage and then
automatically shut down the LHC. If, despite all the measures taken, a connection
should nevertheless melt through, as happened in September 2008, new safety
valves would now prevent a helium pressure wave that had caused far greater
damage in the accident than the direct consequences of the broken connection,
which were limited to a small area.
The LHC collaborations also used the 2 years to improve their particle detec-
tors. Encouraged by the experience of previous years of operation, smaller vac-
uum tubes with an internal diameter of only 4.7 cm were installed around the
collision area. In the space of less than 2 cm that was freed up, ATLAS installed
an additional layer of the tracking detector to be even closer to the point of inter-
action and to better measure particularly short-lived, unstable particles that only
travel a short distance after their production and then decay.
The software with which the LHC collaborations process the recorded data
has also been improved. The amount of raw data generated by the ATLAS or
CMS detector is enormous: the collision rate of 1 billion collisions per second
produces a permanent data stream of 1 petabyte per second (1 PB/s), an incredi-
bly high amount of data equivalent to about 1000 ordinary PC hard disks that are
fully written every second and this over many hours. This data stream cannot be
stored permanently with today’s means.
Fortunately, however, most of the data is produced by long known processes
of the Standard Model. Interesting collisions, which for example produce W and
Z0 bosons or Higgs particles, are much rare. If it is possible to filter out only the
relevant collisions, the amount of data is drastically reduced. This is precisely
what happens in the so-called trigger, which uses fast algorithms to select and fil-
ter only the interesting collisions in a two-stage process. In the first trigger stage,
the arriving data stream of 1 PB/s is buffered for a few microseconds before the
decision has to be made whether to discard or forward the data. The extremely
short decision time only allows the use of programmable logic circuits, so-called
field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), digital integrated circuits, in which
logic operations and connections can be freely programmed and changed. The
criterion for interesting collisions is simple and quickly determinable quantities,
such as high energy in parts of the calorimeter. But even these few restrictions
can reduce the data stream by a thousand times to 1 TB/s.
The second trigger stage, on the other hand, consists of a computer farm in
which several tens of thousands of processors already use very complex algorithms
to combine the information from the various detector components. This enables a
further reduction of the data stream by a thousand times to 1 GB/s, which is now
2.2 The First Beam 21
sent from the LHC experiments to the CERN computer center for permanent stor-
age. To ensure that no important collisions are lost during the strong filtering, a
small part of the raw data stream is also stored and analyzed unfiltered.
From the CERN computer center, the data is then distributed via fast perma-
nent lines to a worldwide network of half a million processors. At least one copy
of the data is located outside the CERN computer center, so that the collected
data is preserved even if data is lost at CERN due to fire or other circumstances.
The worldwide LHC computer network is known as “Grid” and was the first form
of a global computer network, which is now generally referred to as the cloud. As
with the World Wide Web in the 1990s, CERN was the inventor and pioneer of a
technology that has become an integral part of everyday life.
2.2 The First Beam
Toward the end of the long break, the LHC magnets were finally ready to test them
for the original target current in autumn 2014. The entire LHC ring is divided into
eight sectors that can be cooled down to operating temperature and tested inde-
pendently of each other. As with the initial tests when the magnets were delivered,
it was expected that a series of quenches would be necessary to reliably operate the
magnets at high currents and thus the LHC at high energies. The energy target for
2015 of 6.5 TeV per particle beam was slightly lower than the design value of 7 TeV,
for which a large number of quenches were expected, too many to be operational
within a few months. Even 6.5 TeV already posed a challenge and corresponded to a
current of 10,980 amperes through the newly repaired power connections.
The first sector was declared operational shortly before the meeting week
of the CERN Council in mid-December 2014, an important milestone. For the
other sectors, it took a few more months until the last sector was ready a few days
before Easter 2015. A total of 172 quenches were required to bring the magnets
up to 6.55 TeV, only a small safety margin of 0.05 TeV above the target operating
value of 6.5 TeV. An incorrectly polarized magnet and the burn-through of a small
piece of wire in a magnet that caused a short circuit caused only minor delays.
Easter Sunday is the highest holiday in Christianity, on which the resurrection
of Jesus Christ is celebrated all over the world. Easter Sunday marks the end of
Lent, when the Pope gives the blessing urbi et orbi to the city of Rome and the
world. Seven hundred kilometers from Rome, Easter Sunday 2015 also marked
the end of Lent, a long period of more than 2 years during which no particles cir-
culated in the LHC. On the morning of Easter Sunday, the accelerator physicists
wanted to inject particle beams into the LHC again and let them circulate for the
22 2 The Restart
first time after the long break. The LHC was ready, the magnets tested, the beam
monitors waiting to detect the first signs of particles.
The injection from the SPS, the last pre-accelerator, had been successfully
made a few weeks earlier. Now it was a matter of shimmying the beam around
the 27 km long ring, as at the start of the LHC in September 2008. Even though
all the external elements had been tested extensively, there was still uncertainty as
to whether there might have been an obstacle somewhere in the vacuum chamber
blocking the beam.
Twenty years earlier, something similar happened at the LHC’s predecessor,
the LEP collider. Similar to the LHC, there was a longer shutdown period in win-
ter 1995/1996 to increase the collision energy. In June 1996 LEP was to be put
back into operation. But it was not possible to steer the beam around the ring
without losing it. After 5 days of unsuccessful attempts, it became clear that there
had to be an obstacle in the vacuum chamber, so the decision was made to open
the chamber at the presumed location. Two empty beer bottles were found, which
must have been deliberately thrown into the vacuum chamber at two points and
were thus several meters away from the opening.
Someone must have taken the opportunity to make this nasty “joke” when the
vacuum chamber was open during the maintenance period. The police were called
in, fingerprints were taken, as far as they had not evaporated in the ultra high vac-
uum, but the culprit was never found. Since then, the legend goes that there is no
more beer available of a particular brand at CERN. At the same time, the brewery in
Great Britain advertised its beer as “the beer that gets to places no other beer can!”.
Obstacles in the vacuum chamber have been feared since then and are unpre-
dictable, and so a certain tension always remains when, after a longer stop with
the opening of the vacuum chamber, a particle beam is steered around the ring for
the first time.
On Easter Sunday everything went well. There were no obvious obstacles and in
the record time of only 28 min the first beam was systematically steered step by step
around the 27 km long ring. It took only a few minutes longer for the second beam.
At noon on Easter Sunday, particles were again circulating in the LHC, the fasting
was over, in Rome and at CERN, where the LHC ring awoke to new activity.
2.3 UFOs in the LHC
The following weeks were filled with intensive adjustments and controls of the
circulating particle beams. In the process, a phenomenon already known from
earlier years occurred again and again, which was also occasionally observed at
other accelerators: UFOs!
2.4 A New World Record 23
What is meant, however, are not saucer-shaped unknown flying objects as they
appeared especially in the Hollywood movies of the 1950s. In the LHC, there are
“unidentified falling objects” that detach themselves from the wall inside the
vacuum chamber and fall into the passing beam: Dust! When the particle beam
hits the dust particles, it produces an enormous number of shower particles that
penetrate the magnets and trigger a quench, which leads to the rapid switch-off of
the LHC.
It has not yet been fully clarified which dust particles are involved, their origin
and why the particles with a size below 50 µm detach from the wall and under
what circumstances. Occasionally, “massive unidentified falling objects” or
MUFOs are also sighted, with a diameter of approximately 0.3 mm, which are
significantly larger objects than fine dust particles. With the increasing energy and
intensity of the particle beams in the LHC, UFOs pose an ever greater problem,
as the LHC is increasingly often shut down for several hours after a quench. For-
tunately, the rate of UFO-induced quenching decreases over time, as if self-clean-
ing forces were cleaning the vacuum chamber.
Eventually, an “unindentified laying object” was found, an object of unknown
type, one centimeter in size, which was obviously lying at the bottom of the vac-
uum chamber, which is only 3.6 cm high, and was obstructing the free passage
of the particle beam. Presumably, it was air that had entered the vacuum cham-
ber through a small leak and had frozen there. By adjusting the correction mag-
nets accordingly, however, the beam could be directed around the obstacle on the
ground so that no further impairment of operation occurred.
2.4 A New World Record
After a single beam was accelerated to 6.5 TeV just 5 days after the first orbit
on Easter Sunday, the first collisions were also expected to occur at high energy
in early June 2015, but sometimes things happen unusually fast. Already in the
evening of 20 May, a good 2 weeks ahead of schedule, another new world record
was set when a few particle bunches collided for test purposes, but without parti-
cle detectors being fully switched on. Two weeks later, the accelerator physicists
had gained enough confidence in their machine, and for the first time there were
collisions at 13 TeV and “stable beams,” stable conditions for the LHC detectors
(see Fig. 2.1).
This was an important moment, because experimental physicists only dare
to switch on their detectors if the particle beams are circulating quietly around
the ring, do not reach uncontrolled oscillation states, do not come too close to
24 2 The Restart
Fig. 2.1 LHC status web page of June 3, 2015 shortly after the first collisions for the
experiments with an energy of 13 TeV. (© 2015 CERN)
the walls, and thus remain stable. After all, particle detectors are very sensitive
and have to be in order to record all collision products. However, if the particle
beam comes too close to the walls of the vacuum chamber or too close to other
elements of the accelerator in an uncontrolled manner, the protons can interact
with the material and produce an enormous number of other secondary particles,
which then enter the detectors. This excess of charge, light, and radiation carries
the risk of permanent damage despite many built-in protective mechanisms and
rapid switch-offs. “Stable beams,” on the other hand, means a calm stream, the
accelerator physicists do not change the beam conditions and limit themselves to
the most necessary corrections.
This successfully completed the restart of the LHC. In the following months,
the number of particle bunches were gradually increased, and by the end of 2015,
about half the data volume had been collected as in 2011, but at almost twice
the collision energy. As before, the eagerly awaited first results at the new record
energy were presented in a seminar before Christmas. The hunt for the Higgs par-
ticle was over, the Standard Model was thus complete, and there should be no
2.4 A New World Record 25
further “expected discoveries” to complete it. Any unexpected deviation would

therefore point to phenomena beyond the Standard Model of particle physics.
And there was one deviation: Surprisingly for everyone, both ATLAS and
CMS showed an accumulation of decays into two photons, which could have
originated from a new particle with a mass of about 750 GeV. The deviations
were not very significant on their own and were in the range of 1.2–2σ for both
experiments after taking into account the look-elsewhere effect (see Sect. 1.3).
But the deviations occurred in both experiments and at the same particle mass.
The discovery of the Higgs particle had already been announced in the same way.
The theorists were puzzled. Within only 2 weeks until the end of the year 140
publications appeared, without any sign of a Christmas break, but nobody could
provide a conclusive explanation for the possible unknown object. It simply did not
fit into the existing picture, nor into the countless possible extensions of the Stand-
ard Model that theoretical physicists had come up with over the past decades.
The interpretation as a graviton, the hitherto hypothetical1 force carrier of the
gravitational interaction, was still the most fitting. But the graviton would also
have to decay into two electrons or other leptons, and neither ATLAS nor CMS
showed the slightest sign of this. Thus, despite all attempts at explanation, the
deviation remained mysterious, and only more data could clarify whether a sen-
sation was actually emerging that would occupy particle physicists for the next
30 years, or whether it was just a random statistical fluctuation.
In the spring of 2016, the world of physics was, therefore, once again looking
forward with excitement to the start of the LHC, which was to provide the answer
by the time of the big summer conference in Chicago, IL in August, similar to the
Higgs particle 4 years earlier. However, the LHC start was initially delayed by an
unexpected event: a small marten climbed a transformer in an electrical substa-
tion supplying CERN and the LHC and triggered a short circuit. Martens have
been known to penetrate into the engine compartments of cars and bite through
cables and hoses. It is no different at CERN, but a violent electrical flashover
occurred, which the small rodent did not survive, damaged the transformer and
caused a few days of delay. After that the LHC ran better than ever before and
already a few weeks before the conference in Chicago it became apparent that the
deviation in the new data no longer occurred. A statistical fluctuation had put par-
ticle physicists in a state of excitement and hope for new physics for half a year.
Physics beyond the Standard Model had to wait even longer.
1 More about force carriers and interactions in [10].

The Plan of the Century
3
3.1 LHC, the Second
The LHC is a mega-project that will run until 2037 and beyond, as data evalu-
ation will continue until the middle of the century. From the first beginnings in
1984, this covers a period of more than 60 years and thus many generations of
physicists. A break of more than 2 years is planned from 2025 to mid 2027, dur-
ing which the LHC and also the detectors will be upgraded for even higher colli-
sion rates than before. This high luminosity LHC project (HL-LHC) has already
begun and as at the actual LHC, accelerator physicists, particle physicists, and
engineers worldwide are working on more strongly focusing magnets, special
high-frequency resonators and more radiation-hard detectors. By the end of 2017,
just 4% of the data volume expected at the HL-LHC by 2037 has been collected.
A still unsolved problem is the storage and evaluation of the data, which requires
significantly more powerful computers, networks, data media, and more efficient
programming.
The discovery of a Higgs particle in 2012 does not mean the end of the LHC;
on the contrary, it marks the beginning of research of its properties. This is
because we are still not really sure whether the Higgs particle that has been found
is really the particle of Peter Higgs, the Higgs particle of the Standard Model that
he predicted in 1964 more than 50 years ago, even if all the results indicate that
it is. Do the decay rates into other particles of the Standard Model agree with the
theoretical expectations? Are there even more than one Higgs particle, perhaps at
higher masses, which are rarely created in collisions and therefore only become
visible with considerably more data? It is precisely the emergence of more Higgs
particles that would clearly take us to regions beyond the Standard Model.

28 3 The Plan of the Century
This would not be a big surprise, because we have long known from a com-
pletely different area of science that the universe must consist of far more than
the standard model particles that make up the matter we know. Precise measure-
ments of the low temperature fluctuations of the cosmic background radiation, the
deflection of light rays by gravitational lenses due to large but invisible masses in
the galaxies, and other evidences have shown that our universe consists of only
4.9% of ordinary matter. This is the visible, luminous part of the galaxies that
we can detect with our instruments. A much larger proportion, almost 26% of
the universe, on the other hand, is only visible due to gravitational effects, but is
otherwise invisible and is therefore called dark matter. The share of dark energy
is even greater, making up almost 70% of the “rest” of our universe. We know
almost nothing about dark energy, but it is responsible for the increasing expan-
sion of the universe and thus for its distant future.
There are a number of theories for dark matter that propose different parti-
cles beyond the known Standard Model particles as their constituents. One very
attractive possibility would be particles of the so-called supersymmetry, also
affectionately called SUSY, a theory that was developed in the 1970s by various
theorists as an extension of the Standard Model. According to this theory, every
Standard Model particle has a SUSY partner that differs from its sibling parti-
cle in the Standard Model only in its spin and mass. Despite the attractiveness
and popularity among particle physicists, no evidence of SUSY particles has been
found so far, suggesting either that the mass of the SUSY particles must be very
high, too high even for the LHC, or that nature has not provided SUSY particles
after all.
SUSY particles would become noticeable by a lack of energy in the detec-
tor. The lightest SUSY particle would be stable, electrically neutral, and would
leave the detector without further interaction, but would take along momentum
and energy that are missing in the energy balance. At the same time, this parti-
cle would be a good candidate for dark matter in the universe, and it would be a
fascinating idea if the microscopic collisions in the LHC could make statements
about a quarter of the universe. A strong indication of SUSY would also be the
appearance of another Higgs particle at the LHC, because in this theory there
should be at least five Higgs particles. The 2012 particle already found would
then in reality not be the Higgs particle of the Standard Model, but only the light-
est SUSY Higgs particle, which differs only slightly from a Standard Model
Higgs particle in its properties. Precise measurements, which require considera-
bly more data from the LHC and the HL-LHC until 2037, are needed to distin-
guish between the two.
3.2 Bigger, Faster, Further—Future Projects 29
3.2 Bigger, Faster, Further—Future Projects
What happens after the LHC? What are the big questions in particle physics? And
which future accelerators could answer them? To find the best strategy and set the
path for new projects, the European Strategy for Particle Physics was initiated by
the CERN Council more than 10 years ago and adopted in July 2006, before the
LHC was launched and even before the Higgs particle was discovered. Less than
a year after its discovery, the strategy was updated in May 2013 and has since
become the valid directive, according to which the physics programme at the
LHC and its expansion into the HL-LHC in particular have top priority. The US
roadmap, which was published 1 year later, takes a similar view.
The strategy also implies that the three world regions North America, Europe,
and Asia should focus on different aspects of particle physics. As with the LHC,
Europe should focus on research at the highest energies, whereas the USA would
rely on the highest beam intensities to produce an extremely intense neutrino
beam for research with neutrinos. In Asia, in 2013 Japan already announced
plans to build an electron–positron collider, the International Linear Collider
(ILC), with a length of up to 50 km and a collision energy of up to 1 TeV. The
ILC is based on superconducting accelerator sections, a technology that was
already developed at DESY in Hamburg in the 1990s. However, the project called
TESLA, at that time based on this technology and driven by DESY, was not pur-
sued further in Germany after a negative assessment by the German Federal Sci-
ence Council in 2002. Instead, the superconducting technology was used to build
afor X-ray free-electron laser (XFEL), which, after 10 years of construction, has
started regular operation in autumn 2017.
The ILC in Japan, on the other hand, would be a Higgs factory, where over
100,000 Higgs particles could be produced and intensively investigated within a
few years. Since the Higgs particles at the ILC are produced via electron–posi-
tron collisions, in contrast to proton-proton collisions at the LHC, the production
mechanisms are different, so the results would be complementary to the LHC and
would complete the picture of the Higgs particle.
The planned site of the ILC is located in the mountains in the north of Japan,
near the coast, which was devastated by a fatal tsunami in March 2011 that trig-
gered the nuclear disaster in Fukushima. In the structurally weak and rural area
north of Sendai, the local population supports the ILC immensely, but the Jap-
anese government has not yet been able to decide to build the ILC. However, a
decision would have a significant impact to the European strategy. Europe and the
USA have expressed their will in principle to participate in the ILC, but concrete
negotiations are still pending.
At CERN, too, ideas for an electron–positron collider have been on the table
since the late 1980s. With a technology other than the ILC, it would even reach
collision energies of up to 3 TeV: the Compact Linear Collider (CLIC). Despite
its name, this collider would also have a length of 50 km and would fit into the
Geneva region between Lake Geneva and the Jura mountains. Because of its
higher energy, CLIC would be a SUSY factory if SUSY particles were actually
discovered.
Even larger would be the Future Circular Collider (FCC), a ring-shaped accel-
erator 80–100 km in circumference in the Geneva region (see Fig. 3.1). The nec-
essary tunnel would run at a depth of 300–400 m under Lake Geneva and around
Fig. 3.1 Scheme of an 80–100 km long circular tunnel for a Future Circular Collider
(FCC) in the Geneva region compared to the LHC. (© 2014 CERN)
3.2 Bigger, Faster, Further—Future Projects 31
the city of Geneva. The main purpose would be a proton-proton collider with a
collision energy of 100 TeV, more than seven times that of the LHC. This would
require the development of novel superconducting magnets with twice the field
strength of the LHC, based on Nb3Sn instead of NbTi or even using high-temper-
ature superconductors. A first feasibility study with physics objectives and cost
estimate has been prepared and is being continued by more detailed technical
studies until 2026/2027.
The estimated costs for the ILC and CLIC in its first stages are in the range of
6–7 billion €, comparable to the 5 billion Swiss francs needed to build the LHC
more than 10 years ago, which would be in the same range at today’s costs. The
estimated costs of the FCC would be more than 25 billion € in its ultimate stage.
Main costs of the FCC will not arise from the tunnel, which would be reasonably
cheap to build because of its small diameter compared to rail and road tunnels,
but from the high-tech magnets that would fill the tunnel over 100 km.
The results of the feasibility studies by CLIC and FCC, the possible approval
of the ILC, together with the results of the LHC on the Higgs particle were the
main input to the recent update of the European Strategy for Particle Physics
[9], that was approved by the CERN Council in June 2020. In contrast to the last
update in 2013, immediately after the discovery of the Higgs boson, the 2020
strategy was much more difficult to achieve, as there are no clear hints for phys-
ics beyond the Standard Model at the LHC or elsewhere, which would naturally
determine the direction where to go.
The 2020 Strategy recommended two high-priority future initatives: An elec-
tron–positron Higgs factory as the highest-priority next collider, and innovative
accelerator technologies that underpin the physics reach of high-energy and
high-intensity colliders.
The Higgs factory would allow much more precise measurements of the prop-
erties of the Higgs boson, where any deviations from the theoretical predictions
based on the Standard Model would point to physics beyond. The electron–posi-
tron Higgs factory could be the ILC in Japan, where the European particle phys-
ics community would wish to collaborate in case of a timely realization. It could
also be the possible first stage of a future FCC, the so-called FCC-ee, before real-
izing a hadron collider for proton-proton collisions at 100 TeV collision energy,
the FCC-hh, as the ultimate second stage in the second half of this century.
Innovative accelerator technologies would allow to advance in the much
higher energy regime or to uncover much more rare processes due to higher pro-
duction rates, both in view of discovering physics beyond the Standard Model.
Technologies under consideration include high-field magnets, high-temperature
superconductors, plasma wakefield acceleration and other high-gradient acceler-

ating structures, bright muon beams, and energy recovery linacs.
Other essential scientific activities for particle physics are the quest for dark
matter and vigorous support of a broad programme of theoretical research cov-
ering the full spectrum of particle physics from abstract to phenomenologi-
cal topics. The success of particle physics experiments also relies on innovative
instrumentation and state-of-the-art infrastructures as well as large-scale data-in-
tensive software and computing infrastructures that are an essential ingredient to
particle physics research programmes.
An end to the success story of particle physics and CERN is not in sight.
Outlook
4
In this essential you have learned how the LHC was finally put into operation
in September 2008 after long planning, when protons circulated in the LHC for
the first time under the eyes of the world public, but only a few days later the
LHC was massively damaged in an accident. Despite a delay of more than a year
and with only half the collision energy, the data were nevertheless sufficient to
announce the discovery of a new particle from the ATLAS and CMS collabora-
tions on July 4, 2012, with the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013 awarded to the two
theoretical physicists François Englert and Peter Higgs as the preliminary high
point.
The restart of the world machine after a break of more than 2 years in spring
2015 marks the beginning of new research at the LHC. The Higgs particle must
be further measured and compared with the theoretical predictions. Thanks to an
energy almost twice as high as before, new particles in particular may only be
waiting to be discovered in the next few years, such as SUSY particles as possible
candidates for dark matter in the universe. Each newly discovered particle could
trigger a revolution in the understanding of our world and the universe.
The LHC, and later the HL-LHC from 2026 onward, will run until 2037. New
accelerators, which will run well into the second half of the twenty-first century,
are already being seriously discussed. A milestone marks the updated European
Strategy for Particle Physics, which has been adopted by the CERN Council in
May 2020 and sets the direction of particle physics in the coming decades.
The first part of this essential series [10] deals with the origins, history, and
successes of CERN. You will learn about the basic features of the Standard
Model, how particle accelerators work, and get an overview of the LHC with its
technological challenges and construction. The second part [11] begins with the
magnificent launch of the LHC in September 2008, which was followed only a

34 4 Outlook
few days later by the great disillusionment when a part of the LHC was destroyed
in an accident and the start of operations was delayed by more than a year. You
will learn how the collaborations of the thousands of physicists who built and
operate the large particle detectors at the LHC were formed and read about how a
particle detector works and what properties are measured.
In two further essentials of this series [12, 13] you will also learn more about
the background of the Higgs particle, the Standard Model, and New Physics
beyond the Standard Model from the perspective of a theoretical physicist.
What You Learned from This essential
• On July 4, 2012, the discovery of the Higgs particle with the two large parti-
cle detectors ATLAS and CMS was announced, with the Nobel Prize in Phys-
ics 2013 awarded to the two theoretical physicists François Englert and Peter
Higgs as the preliminary highlight.
• The Higgs particle is an excitation of the Brout-Englert-Higgs field, which
gives most elementary particles of the Standard Model their mass. The detec-
tion of the Higgs particle also confirms the mechanism for generating mass.
The Higgs particle was discovered as the last missing particle of the Standard
Model of particle physics.
• Future research will focus on the increasingly precise measurement of the
Higgs particle and on the discovery of new particles that would testify phys-
ics beyond the Standard Model. SUSY particles as possible candidates of dark
matter in the universe could also be generated at the LHC or at subsequent
accelerators.

Higgs Particle, essentials, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-34383-5
References
1. Higgs, Peter W. 1964. Broken symmetries, massless particles and gauge fields. Physics
Letters 12 (2): 132–133. https://doi.org/10.1016/0031-9163(64)91136-9.
2. Higgs, Peter W. 1964. Broken symmetries and the masses of gauge bosons. Physical
Review Letters 13 (16): 508–509. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.13.508.
3. Englert, F., and R. Brout. 1964. Broken symmetry and the mass of gauge vector
mesons. Physical Review Letters 13 (9): 321–323. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrev-
lett.13.321.
4. Lieberherr, Martin. Nadel im Heuhaufen. http://physik.li/publikationen/Heuhaufen.pdf.
5. Mumdzhiev, Milko. 2010. „Erster Zwischenbericht zur Studie: Körpergröße als
Indikator Sozialer Ungleichheit.“ Nürnberger Beiträge zur Sozial- und Wirtschafts-
forschung, 03/10. Nürnberg. https://www.ssoar.info/ssoar/handle/document/25024.
6. “Brief history of the Higgs mechanism.” School of Physics and Astronomy, The Uni-
versity of Edinburgh. 2014. http://www.ph.ed.ac.uk/higgs/brief-history.
7. Incandela, Joseph, Fabiola Gianotti, and Rolf Heuer. 2012. “Latest update in the
search for the Higgs boson”. CERN seminar. https://indico.cern.ch/event/197461/.
8. “The Nobel Prize in physics 2013.” Nobelprize.org. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_
prizes/physics/laureates/2013/.
9. “The European strategy for particle physics.” CERN. http://council.web.cern.ch/en/
content/european-strategy-particle-physics.
10. Hauschild, Michael. 2016. Neustart des LHC: CERN und die Beschleuniger. Wies-
baden: Springer Fachmedien. ISBN 978-3-658-13478-5, 978-3-658-13479-2.
11. Hauschild, Michael. 2018. Neustart des LHC: Die Detektoren. Wiesbaden: Springer
Fachmedien. ISBN 978-3-658-23105-7, 978-3-658-23106-4.
12. Knochel, Alexander. 2016. Neustart des LHC: Das Higgs-Teilchen und das Standardmod-
ell. Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien. ISBN 978-3-658-11626-2, 978-3-658-11627-9.
13. Knochel, Alexander. 2016. Neustart des LHC: Neue Physik. Wiesbaden: Springer
Fachmedien. ISBN 978-3-658-13906-3, 978-3-658-13907-0.

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Exploring the Large

• an introduction to a current issue within your field of expertise

More information about this subseries at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/16761

Exploring the Large

ISSN 2197-6708 ISSN 2197-6716 (electronic)

Responsible Editor: Lisa Edelhaeuser

• Mass does it!—How the particles get their mass

1 The Discovery of a New Particle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2021 1

1.1 The Origin of Mass—The Field and the Particle

1.2 Higgs Hunting—Before the LHC

Predicting the occurrence of a new phenomenon or a new particle associated with

products can be found in a particle detector. The production of the particle

1.3 Statistics is Everything

1.4 Is it a Higgs?

1.5 The Nobel Prize

2.1 A Long Stop

© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2021 19

2.2 The First Beam

2.3 UFOs in the LHC

2.4 A New World Record

further “expected discoveries” to complete it. Any unexpected deviation would

1 More about force carriers and interactions in [10].

3.1 LHC, the Second

© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2021 27

3.2 Bigger, Faster, Further—Future Projects

superconductors, plasma wakefield acceleration and other high-gradient acceler-

© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2021 33

© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2021 35

© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2021 37

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1.1 The Origin of Mass—The Field and the Particle

1.2 Higgs Hunting—Before the LHC

1.3 Statistics is Everything

1.4 Is it a Higgs?

1.5 The Nobel Prize

2.1 A Long Stop

2.2 The First Beam

2.3 UFOs in the LHC

2.4 A New World Record

3.1 LHC, the Second

3.2 Bigger, Faster, Further—Future Projects