scientists at the Large Hadron Collider announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, a decades-long search for particle that explains how other particles acquire their mass.
The Higgs boson is part of the "Higgs field," which is like an "invisible field" that fills the entire universe. When particles pass through this field, some interact strongly with it and gain a lot of mass (such as heavy quarks), some interact slightly and gain a little mass (such as electrons), and some do not interact at all and therefore remain massless (such as photons).
In short, the Higgs boson is the reason why matter has mass, and therefore the secret to our physical existence at all.
This discovery was like opening a new gateway to understanding the structure of the universe at the very fundamental level, but the story doesn't end there. Scientists are still trying to unravel the secrets of this mysterious particle by studying its rare decay patterns.
Peter Higgs, who postulated the existence of the Higgs boson, and then won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013 with Belgian François Englert for their role in its discovery (European)
Atlas Experience
In August 2025, researchers at the ATLAS experiment, one of the largest experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, revealed impressive results: for the first time, they were able to track the decay of the Higgs boson into a pair of muons, particles similar to electrons but about 200 times heavier.
In addition, scientists have dramatically improved their ability to observe another rare decay, the Higgs decay into a Z boson and a photon.
Inside a hadron collider, protons collide with each other at nearly the speed of light. Sometimes, the Higgs boson is born from this collision, but it only lives for a trillionth of a second and quickly disappears by decaying into other particles.
The massive ATLAS instruments detect these particles produced by this decay (such as muons and photons), and by analyzing them with tremendous statistical precision, scientists can determine the "path" taken by the Higgs particle.
These results are not just technical details, but steps on a larger path to fully understanding the nature of the Higgs boson (Valerie Lentz)
rare phenomena
Decay into muons is an extremely rare phenomenon, occurring only once in every 5,000 decays. Its detection means that the Higgs boson interacts not only with heavy particles from the first generation of the Standard Model of particle physics (such as heavy quarks), but also with the second generation (muons). This confirms that the Standard Model of physics still stands up to the toughest tests.
