How was the Higgs boson actually detected at the Large Hadron Collider, according to Victoria Martin?

Victoria Martin says only about two in a billion proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider produce a Higgs boson, and it decays almost instantly, so nobody sees it directly. Physicists instead looked for the predicted signatures of its decay, such as a pair of photons whose energy the detectors can measure precisely. The discovery was announced at CERN on 4 July 2012.

• Peter Higgs proposed the Higgs field in 1964 to explain why the W and Z bosons, found at CERN in 1983, are 80 to 90 times as heavy as a proton.
• Martin says the Higgs itself turned out to be about 125 times as heavy as a proton.

Source: our own transcription of the episode. The full conversation is on In Our Time (2026-10-22). Read the whole episode summary →

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