Could ALICE Find the Elusive Higgs?

The Higgs boson is the theoretical mechanism for creating the mass of particles. Although it has never been seen, the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the most likely place for it to be created in the laboratory. The ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) detector is focused on the study of heavy ion collisions at the LHC and was not designed to find the Higgs boson; however, there is a chance it could be detected there. Although the luminosity (collision rate) for PbPb collisions is much lower than that for pp collisions, PbPb collisions have a higher probability to produce a Higgs boson because of the number of nucleons in the collision. ALICE has the capability of measuring the decay of a Higgs into two photons. In this paper we determine the probability of observing the Higgs at ALICE by estimating the rate of Standard Model Higgs production from established theories and combining it with the physical capabilities of ALICE. Code was developed to search for Higgs Boson candidates in the pp data collected during our two-month visit to CERN to work on ALICE in 2010. Particle Physics: What’s It All About? Every day people take for granted the fact that everything we encounter is made up of something smaller than what we can see on the surface. If asked, most people have probably heard something about atoms and molecules, and they might even know something about electrons, protons and neutrons. However, in order to probe the nature of the particles that are even smaller than these and the interactions between them, one must study particle physics. The aim of particle physics is to probe and figure out the fundamental laws that control the make-up of matter at the subatomic level and ultimately the universe. This probing, as is the case for all areas of physics, comes in two different forms: theory and experimentation, both of which play a huge role in our search for the elusive Higgs Boson. As a science, particle physics is relatively young and really took off in the 20th century. With help from physicists such as Paul Dirac, Hideki Yukawa and Richard Feymnan, it has become the field we know today. In nature, there are four fundamental forces that, as far as we can see, control the universe and all that happens in it. These forces are the strong nuclear force, the electromagnetic force, the weak nuclear force and the gravitational force. Of these forces, the strong nuclear force is the strongest and is an attractive force between nucleons (protons and neutrons). It is also responsible for the interactions between quarks and gluons, which make up protons, neutrons and other particles. However,