The ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN have announced new results which show that Higgs boson decays into two muons.
The Higgs boson, discovered at the CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, in 2012, is the particle that gives all other fundamental particle mass, according to the standard model of particle physics. Higgs bosons are produced from proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider. Nevertheless, regardless of the work of hundreds of researchers around the globe, nobody has been able to determine precisely the way it does that or why some particles are more massive than others.
For the first time, the ATLAS and CMS collaborations observed that Higgs boson decays into two muons, a sort of particles that never directly seen interact with it before. The muon is a heavier copy of the electron, one of the elementary particles that constitute matter content of the Universe. Muons belong to the second generation particle, while electrons are classified as the first-generation particles. The physics process of the Higgs boson decaying into muons is a rare phenomenon as only one Higgs in 5000 decays into muons. These new results have pivotal importance for fundamental physics because they indicate for the first time that the Higgs boson interacts with second-generation elementary particles.
In the Standard Model, elementary particles acquire mass through interaction with the Higgs field: the stronger the interaction, the larger the mass of the particle. So far, physicists have collected the evidence of the Higgs boson interacting with bosons and heavier elementary fermions belonging to the third fermion generation (tau-lepton as well as top and bottom quarks). Yet to date, there is no indication whether it interacts with next lighter fermions, muons, or charm, belonging to the second generation.
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