Scientists are working on the ATLAS experiment They decided to take a look The mechanism of symmetry breaking and electroweak interactions, and analysis of data on the top quark that appears as a result of the collision of protons. They targeted the T-quark because it interacts strongly with the Higgs field, making it the most massive elementary particle.
Scientists want to monitor the decay of individual t-quarks, take into account deviations from Standard Model predictions, and study symmetry breaking in electroweak interactions. The problem is that individual T quarks are very difficult to observe. Pairs of t-quarks are much easier to observe, but they are controlled by the strong force. Therefore, they decided to look for other pairs – a single quark with a photon interacting with it.
The t quark decays very quickly. Its decay products are the b quark and the W boson. The b quark combines with other quarks to form new hadrons, which then decay into a stream of particles called a “b jet.” Meanwhile, the W boson decays into an electron or muon and a neutrino. Scientists created virtual simulations of quark-photon pairs and, based on them, taught their algorithm to search data obtained from the ATLAS experiment for information about the simultaneous appearance of a missing gamma-ray photon, jet photon, electron or muon. Energy associated with the presence of the neutrino, which ATLAS cannot detect. Once their algorithm was trained, they gave it real data to analyze. The results exceeded their wildest expectations. The algorithm detected the required data with a confidence level of 9.8 sigma. Meanwhile, from 5 sigma there is talk of a discovery. 9.8 sigma means that the discovered data is unlikely to have come about by chance.
Now scientists will want to take a closer look at photon-quark pairs, and hope it will help them decipher symmetry breaking in electroweak interactions. This would be an important step towards understanding the nature of the Higgs boson and the mechanism by which particles gain mass.
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