TOW #12 "Observation of a new particle in the search for the Standard Model Higgs boson with the ATLAS detector at the LHC"

"The previous ATLAS searches in 4.6–4.8 fb⁻¹ of data at  are combined here with new searches for H→ZZ^(⁎)→4ℓ,¹H→γγ and H→WW^(⁎)→eνμν in the 5.8–5.9 fb⁻¹ of pp collision data taken at  between April and June 2012."


A bit out of my league this week. I'm trying to read scientific papers, and found the 2012 document "Observation of a new particle in the search for the Standard Model Higgs boson with the ATLAS detector at the LHC." This paper, with well over one hundred contributors, is the official identification of the long-searched-for Higgs Boson. It is broken into 10 sections that introduce the concept of the Higgs, the method used to find it, and a long statistical proof of the discovery, all of which intend to report findings and prove that a Higgs Boson was indeed present. The discovery came four years after the completion of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2008. The LHC, located in Switzerland, is the world's highest-power particle accelerator and collider. ATLAS is a particular sensor in the LHC where particle collisions take place, and the resulting data is interpreted to "find" a Higgs Boson. The Higgs Boson is a particle that was previously undiscovered, but necessary to complete the Standard Model of the Universe, the simplest organization of physical equations, particles, and forces, to date. Therefore, this discovery, and this paper, are massive contributions to our understanding of particle physics. That being said, this article is obviously written for members of the scientific community involved in this research. One must be very familiar with experimental physics to understand the mechanisms, processes, and results described, as well as a background in statistical analysis. The rhetorical device most obviously present is jargon. The paper, published in one of the preeminent journals of physics, is clearly credible, but it is also obvious from the technical language that the authors have a very thorough understanding of their experiment. Because there is an assumed audience of highly educated scientists, jargon allows for the authors to move on to their discovery, without restating what each concepts mean. For me, this made the article impossible to get through. Should I have know what the symbols and terms meant,  the sequential order of established fact followed by new discovery would have presented logical findings. The paper also made use of a series of images and graphs to present data that would be overwhelming otherwise. Accompanying the sections on data, these concisely represented information. I am clearly not the target audience, so I could not fully grasp the extent of the article's rhetoric, and cannot really comment on its effectiveness.

The data obtained from decaying particles, indicating the presence of a Higgs Boson.