With the Higgsy game project, you can go for a Higgs hunt using your own mobile device!
It’s been already 10 years since we have seen the first overwhelming evidence for the Higgs boson production at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) announced by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations. The 4th of July, 2012, is one of the most astonishing events that ever happened in the particle physics’ world when the speculated Higgs boson particle finally united with its long-awaited experimental evidence; a day with haunting feeling of lending an ear to the walls of the overcrowded main auditorium at CERN. The desire to relive that precious moment of our scientific life journeys led me to the creation of this game.
We are still far from making the “time travel” work these days, but now there is one thing that we can do - carry a few Higgs bosons around with us. This is how the Higgsy game project lets you play and experiment with a small portable (and cheaper) collider and a virtual detector of your own.
Carrying out an experiment is a quite challenging task. Before diving into the hunting for Higgs bosons, the player is invited to spend some time discovering the main features of the Higgs boson’s decays and how to correctly identify the underlying experimental signatures that are produced in the detector. Sometimes, things can get rather entangled - just like it happens in real life!
Work hard, play hard - if you did your studies well, the observation should become reality! Using the game mode that emulates the real experiment, one can produce a limited number of events with the Higgs boson. Generate events one by one and see if you are able to reproduce the famous discovery by observing a Higgs boson’s mass peak appearing on the display and reach the « five sigma ».
Even if we have established and examined the existence of the Higgs boson through the magnifying glasses of enquiring minds of particle physicists, there is still more to learn about this fundamental particle in the coming years. Despite the fact that the main production and decay channels are now well studied, there is still enough room for new physics phenomena to hide in the wrinkles of the Higgs boson’s grin as we keep putting it under the scrutiny of our most powerful microscopes.
Our little Higgsy will continue to grow up as we unravel its mysteries.
- Higgsy is available on all iOS devices and can be downloaded for free from AppStore: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/higgsy/id1623065412
Disclaimer: The views expressed in CMS blogs are personal views of the author and do not necessarily represent official views of the CMS collaboration.