“Find the Higgs” was a 2.4σ hint from one year of public data. It now also runs on ATLAS’s larger 2015–2016 release (36 fb⁻¹, 212,877 photon pairs), and the bump at 125 GeV crosses the 5σ line physicists use for a discovery. The analysis was frozen before any mass was computed. Statistical uncertainty only; the page says so.
See it happen →Making two Higgs at once is absurdly rare.
Each tap is one proton–proton collision in a detector like ATLAS, seen end-on. Almost all of them are ordinary sprays of particles. The one physicists hunt for is two Higgs bosons at once.
While you've had this page open, an LHC running at full intensity would have made:
The pair rate measures the hat itself.
Two diagrams make a pair: a box (a top-quark loop) and a triangle, where one Higgs splits in two. Only the triangle depends on the self-coupling κλ, and the two cancel, so the rate is lowest near κλ ≈ 2.3, not at 0. This slider is linked to the one on the hat.
Things this page can't tell you.
- Is our vacuum truly the bottom of the hat, or only a long-lived dip (metastable)?
- Why cancel near 2.3: does that make a bigger or a smaller self-coupling easier to catch?
- Can single-Higgs measurements pin κλ down before pairs are ever seen?
- Did the hat's shape decide how the early universe cooled into this one?
Want real data? Find the Higgs yourself in actual ATLAS collisions from 2016.
Ask a particle physicist. They love this one. The first, more detailed version of this page is at /higgs/lab/.