Large Hadron Collider has helped determine the distribution of masses that the Higgs boson can have, a measure known as its width

Physics 20 October 2022

The Higgs boson was discovered at the LHC in 2012

Maximilien Brice/CERN

Physicists have made the most precise estimations yet of the “width” of the Higgs boson.

In the standard model of particle physics, the Higgs boson imbues all other fundamental particles with mass. It was discovered in the aftermath of extremely fast protons crashing into each other at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland in 2012. But the properties of the Higgs are hard to pin down because it sticks around for such a short amount of time before …