The ATLAS experiment and CMS experiment searched proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider at collision energies of and . The ATLAS experiment used silicon tracking, a solenoid, liquid-argon electromagnetic calorimeters and an external muon spectrometer. Its July 2012 paper reported a combined local statistical significance of standard deviations near ; this paper result is distinct from the initial 4 July announcement.[ref]
The CMS experiment used silicon tracking in a solenoid, lead-tungstate electromagnetic calorimeters and external muon chambers. Electrons combine tracks and particle showers; muons combine tracking and chamber hits; photons supply shower energies and directions. Selected and candidates, with , yielded invariant mass peaks. It checked lepton efficiencies with Z boson decays, estimated fake-lepton backgrounds from control samples with relaxed identification, and fitted the smooth diphoton background from data. Its combined local statistical significance was standard deviations near .[ref]
The ATLAS experiment compared signal-plus-background and background-only hypotheses with a profile likelihood, accounting for systematic uncertainties and correlations between decay channels. Diphoton and four-lepton candidates gave precise invariant masses; decays supplied additional evidence with poorer mass reconstruction because of escaping neutrinos. A local p-value concerns one specified mass; scanning masses requires a look-elsewhere effect correction.[ref]
Two-photon decay excludes spin one under the usual assumptions, but does not prove spin zero. A mass peak does not determine every Higgs boson coupling. Production rates, branching fractions and angular correlations require additional tests.[ref]
Awarded in equal shares to François Englert and Peter W. Higgs for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism explaining the origin of mass in subatomic particles, confirmed by discovery of the predicted particle in the ATLAS experiment and CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider.[ref]
The protons at the Large Hadron Collider are ultrarelativistic: their energy is much greater than their rest energy, about . The relativistic energy-momentum relation therefore gives . Using the de Broglie wavelength,
Thus the conventional de Broglie wavelength estimate is a distance of order .
There is a conventional factor of in interpreting this estimate. Spatial resolution from momentum transfer is often expressed as , where is the transferred momentum multiplied by the speed of light. Taking of order the beam energy gives
Both conventions describe the same characteristic scale up to . The beam energy alone does not give an exact experimental spatial resolution: a particular collision probes a scale set by its actual momentum transfer.