The London Science Museum has an amusing interactive game which gives us all a chance to hunt for the Higgs. They show you what Higgs production looks like in a collision at the LHC (albeit, via a very limited set of final states – good enough if the Higgs is heavier than about 180 GeV) and they show what a typical uninteresting Standard Model background process looks like. Then they give you a bunch of collisions with the chance to record 5 events in 30 seconds. Are any of the events you chose an actual Higgs event? Mine were, but then this is what I do for a living (well, almost!). The game is a rather simplified version of what life will be like at the LHC, but it’s fun.
Via Kelen Tuttle at SLAC Today.
May 30th, 2007 at 2:23 pm
Man, that is one creepy looking Higgs particle they’ve got there.
May 30th, 2007 at 3:33 pm
That’s the Oh-My-God-Medusa’s-Head particle.
May 30th, 2007 at 4:33 pm
Hmm, I keep looking for Higgs’ bosom.
May 30th, 2007 at 8:00 pm
I found one!!!!!
May 30th, 2007 at 10:21 pm
Dale Chihuly, life immitates art.
May 31st, 2007 at 3:32 am
Cute game. No, I will not admit how much fun I had.
May 31st, 2007 at 5:15 am
Always wondered what these particles look like
May 31st, 2007 at 12:00 pm
I got 1 out of 5!!
May 31st, 2007 at 12:16 pm
This is a great game for teaching about triggers and so forth. I wish they had explained a little more (1) why certain tracks look like they did, and (2) why certain decays left the tracks they did. Can’t have everything, I suppose. (And I did find the Higgs, one out of five times, which is probably a five-sigma detection.)
June 1st, 2007 at 9:32 pm
Fun! I found one out of 5 as well, and actually learned some particle physics
June 3rd, 2007 at 4:37 pm
I agree with Sean — I actually found the very educational nature of the site more interesting than the game. I wish there’d be sites like these, being much more thorough and not primarly about a game. The stuff they wrote in passing was interesting to a science amateur like me that sometimes have to dig through science-speak to reach the understandable stuff.
June 4th, 2007 at 5:58 am
[...] Znalezione tu. [...]
June 5th, 2007 at 5:00 pm
[...] – Hunt for the Higgs: riuscite a trovare l’elusivo bosone di Higgs e a confermare così il modello standard della fisica delle particelle? Via Cosmic Variance. [...]
June 16th, 2007 at 4:24 am
I had high hopes that when CERN switched on the LHC in November of this year, they would inadvertently create a black hole, thus increasing the sales of my book, ‘The Ancient Order of Moridura’ (with a related theme of a nascent singularity created by a meteorite impact in Extremadura).
But then I realised that the extinction of the planet – and probably the solar system – would prevent me from collecting my royalties. Life can be unfair sometimes!
However, doomsday has been postponed until April/May of 2008 because of problems with magnets.
The Higgs boson must be chuckling quietly in interstellar space, its anonymity preserved for a little longer.
http://moridura.blogspot.com
September 6th, 2008 at 4:20 am
[...] un pequeño juego en flash que proporciona el London Science Museum, y del que JoAnne nos habla en Cosmic Variance. En este juego nos van saliendo una serie de trazas simplificadas de las que tenemos que elegir [...]
September 21st, 2008 at 2:30 am
It would be great if this nice Higgs hunting site actually allowed to choose the mass of the Higgs boson in its expected mass range. Maybe also different Higgs boson pictures, depending on its main decay channels? The Z boson robe and so on?