Hunt for the Higgs!

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JoAnne at 1:52 pm, May 30th, 2007

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.

Click here to play!

Via Kelen Tuttle at SLAC Today.

Science and the Media
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15 Comments on “Hunt for the Higgs!” rss feed

Ambitwistor on May 30th, 2007 at 2:23 pm

Man, that is one creepy looking Higgs particle they’ve got there.
Navneeth on May 30th, 2007 at 3:33 pm

That’s the Oh-My-God-Medusa’s-Head particle.
Jugalator on May 30th, 2007 at 4:33 pm

Hmm, I keep looking for Higgs’ bosom.
Eugene on May 30th, 2007 at 8:00 pm

I found one!!!!!
undergrad math student on May 30th, 2007 at 10:21 pm

Dale Chihuly, life immitates art.
Yvette on May 31st, 2007 at 3:32 am

Cute game. No, I will not admit how much fun I had.
Paul Titze on May 31st, 2007 at 5:15 am

Always wondered what these particles look like
Guillermo AlcÃ¡ntara on May 31st, 2007 at 12:00 pm

I got 1 out of 5!!
Sean on 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.)
Risa on Jun 1st, 2007 at 9:32 pm

Fun! I found one out of 5 as well, and actually learned some particle physics
Jugalator on Jun 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.
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[...] Znalezione tu. [...]
Pingback from Giavasan » Captcha! on Jun 5th, 2007 at 5:00 pm

[...] - Hunt for the Higgs: riuscite a trovare l’elusivo bosone di Higgs e a confermare cosÃ¬ il modello standard della fisica delle particelle? Via Cosmic Variance. [...]
Peter Curran on Jun 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
Pingback from Cazar al bosón de Higgs « La Singularidad Desnuda on Sep 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 [...]