Physicists from the CMS Collaboration at CERN have simply publicly launched the mix of CMS measurements that contributed to establishing the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012.
CMS occasion show of a candidate Higgs boson decaying into two photons, one of many two decay channels that had been key to the invention of the particle. Picture credit score: CERN.
“Physics measurements based mostly on information from CERN’s Massive Hadron Collider (LHC) are often reported as a central worth and its corresponding uncertainty,” the CMS physicists stated.
“For example, quickly after observing the Higgs boson in LHC proton-proton collision information, CMS measured its mass as 125.3 plus or minus 0.6 GeV (the proton mass being about 1 GeV).”
“However this determine is only a temporary abstract of the measurement consequence, a bit just like the title of a e-book.”
In a measurement, the complete info extracted from the information is encoded in a mathematical perform, referred to as the chance perform, that features the measured worth of a amount in addition to its dependence on exterior elements.
“Within the case of a CMS measurement, these elements embody the calibration of the CMS detector, the accuracy of the CMS detector simulation used to facilitate the measurement and different systematic results,” the researchers stated.
“A chance perform of a measurement based mostly on LHC information may be complicated, as many elements have to be pinned down to completely perceive the messy collisions that happen on the LHC.”
“For instance, the chance perform of the mix of CMS Higgs boson discovery measurements, which CMS simply launched in digital format, has almost 700 parameters for a set worth of the Higgs boson mass.”
“Amongst these, just one — the variety of Higgs bosons discovered within the information — is the physics parameter of curiosity, whereas the remaining mannequin systematic uncertainties.”
“Every of those parameters corresponds to a dimension of a multi-dimensional summary area, wherein the chance perform may be drawn.”
“It’s onerous for people to visualise an area with various dimensions, not to mention one with many.”
The brand new launch of the chance perform of the CMS Higgs boson discovery measurements — the primary chance perform to be made publicly out there by the collaboration — permits researchers to get round this downside.
With a publicly accessible chance perform, physicists exterior the CMS Collaboration can now exactly issue within the CMS Higgs boson discovery measurements of their research.
“The discharge of this chance perform, in addition to that of the Mix software program, which is used to mannequin the chance and match the information, marks a brand new milestone in CMS’s decade-long dedication to completely open science,” the scientists stated.
“It joins lots of of open-access publications, the discharge of just about 5 petabytes of CMS information on the CERN open-data portal and the publication of its total software program framework on GitHub.”
