ATLAS measures Higgs boson lifetime

The UMass group with Rafael Coelho Lopes de Sa and colleagues released new results from the ATLAS collaboration on the Higgs boson width.  Group postdocs Martina Javurkova and Michien Jan Veen, graduate student Jay Sandesara and recent PhD Samyukta Krishnamurthy contributed to the result.  Jan Veen and Coelho Lopes de Sa announced the results in major talks at two conferences this year. Krishnamurthy, whose thesis reports some of the results is now a faculty member at the University of Arizona.

The discovery and measurement of the mass of the Higgs boson in 2012 were recognized with a Nobel prize.  The lifetime is another basic property of the particle and its decay pathways, however the narrow width of the Higgs particle has meant it has taken a decade after the original discovery for a precise measurement using subtle, indirect means to deduce the width.