May/June 2008

The Making of a New Collider

Continued from page 3

By Katherine Bourzac

Picturing Higgs and Z Prime
Data gathered inside the CMS and other detectors will be reconstructed as event visualizations like the hypothetical ones pictured here. In these images, the dots represent ionization signals left by particles traversing a detector. Software picks through the data to trace particles' paths, represented as lines. The existence of newly observed particles is inferred if the products they decay into are detected. One of the particles likely to be detected by the CMS in its early days is called Z prime, says MIT particle physicist Steven Nahn; the evidence it leaves behind is thought to include two easy-to-detect particles, muons and electrons. At right is a visualization of a Z prime decaying into jets of energetic particles, represented by the rectangular beams. The image above is a visualization of a Higgs boson decaying into four muons. The curly lines represent particles with low momentum that don't reach the farthest detectors. Providing evidence of the Higgs boson, a hypothe­sized particle that is thought to explain why particles have mass, would be a major coup for the LHC.

Credit: Cern