New study on pair production of the Higgs boson The discovery of the new fundamental particle, the Higgs boson, at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is the latest step in the long quest to try answer one of the most pressing questions in physics: why particles have mass. An EU-funded project provided more precise measurements of an important quantity determining the mass generation mechanism associated with this particle. Fundamental Research © Designua, Shutterstock Finding the Higgs boson marked a key milestone in particle physics since it remained the last missing piece of the standard model, a theory that describes our present understanding of elementary particles and their interactions with stunning accuracy. In the standard model, the Higgs mechanism refers to the generation of masses for the W± and Z weak gauge bosons through electroweak symmetry breaking. Following the discovery of this particle, both theoretical and experimental physicists have been attempting to perform more precise measurements of its properties. One of the most important traits of the Higgs particle is the way it couples to itself. Within the EU-funded project HIGGSSELFCOUPLING (Precision Higgs boson self-coupling measurements), scientists focused on improving measurements of Higgs boson pair production at the LHC and future colliders. The project team first developed advanced Monte Carlo event generator tools for the production of Higgs boson pairs. They obtained improved measurements by merging a parton shower, which describes the final states of high-energy particle collisions with the matrix elements of the Higgs boson pairs associated with jet production. Furthermore, the event generator was used for studying the background processes in triple Higgs boson production at a future hadron collider. Another part of project work was geared towards investigating the decay of the Higgs bosons to bottom quark and bottom anti-quark pairs, providing interesting insight for future experimental studies. HIGGSSELFCOUPLING also investigated the potential of Higgs pair production at a 100 TeV collider by examining the final states of the b-quark pairs. Measuring the Higgs boson couplings as precisely as possible is a major goal of particle physics researchers. Project results were widely recognised by the scientific community, having a strong impact on LHC ongoing experiments. Keywords Pair production, Higgs boson, mass generation, HIGGSSELFCOUPLING, self-coupling
