An “impossible” Higgs measurement becomes reality thanks to AI (and QCD)

Posted on 14/04/2026 by Jon Butterworth

Higgs bosons produced with high transverse momentum are a key probe for new physics.

An event display of a possible Higgs boson event showing two back-to-back jets.

An event display of a possible Higgs boson event showing two back-to-back jets. One jet shows a clear separation of energy deposits (in green) which is a sign of the Higgs decay.

Since the discovery of the Higgs boson back in 2012, one of the most important things we have been doing at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is measuring how Higgs bosons are produced and how they decay. The Higgs is a vital, singular and relatively unexplored feature of the Standard Model of particle physics. Measuring its properties and dynamics is a really promising avenue for pushing the limits of that model, and looking for clues to how it might be extended to explain some of the things it currently cannot1.

Continue reading →
Posted in Particle Physics, Physics, Science | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Some history of UCL and particle physics

Posted on 05/04/2026 by Jon Butterworth

UCL is 200 years old this year, and there is a lot to celebrate. Physics and astronomy have been here since the start.

Continue reading →
Posted in Astrophysics, Education, History, Particle Physics, Writing | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Some history of UCL and particle physics

Data taking

Posted on 23/03/2026 by Jon Butterworth

A break from funding crises… We are in the last physics run of the Large Hadron Collider before we go into a long shutdown to upgrade the beam intensity.

Courtesy of ATLAS, the experiment I work on, you can see the status of the accelerator here: Event Counter Info.

And we have an Event Counter running, telling you how many high-energy proton collisions have happen, and roughly how many Higgs bosons will have been produced in those collisions.

More collisions, and more Higgs bosons, are important because, quantum mechnics being essentially random, the more data we get, the smaller the uncertainties will be on the multitude of things we measure. We have also produced summary of some recent results, that we sent to the Moriond 2026 conference.

That’s the point of the upgrade – more collisions. And improved detectors, so we can learn more from them.

Posted in Particle Physics, Physics, Science, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Data taking

Cuts, Commitments, and Contradictions

Posted on 09/03/2026 by Jon Butterworth

After my previous post on the parliamentary committees last week, I think it is worth highlighing this blog post by Lucien Heurtier.

Lucien is a postdoctoral research associate in theoretical physics at King’s College London. As well as having a valuable perspective on the committee meetings I discussed, he was also one of the group of fellows and early career researchers who signed letters (here and here) about the cuts to particle, astro and nuclear physics. As such, he had a meeting last Tuesday with Sir Ian Chapman and Prof Michele Dougherty (heads of UKRI and STFC respectively) and Prof Grahame Blair (STFC’s Executive Director of Programmes). I found his account of that meeting quite revealing.

Continue reading →
Posted in Arts, Politics, Science Policy | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Cuts, Commitments, and Contradictions