Higgs Production With Electon-positron Collisions

Most recent answer: 08/28/2012

Q:
In the higg boson experimant why the proton is used not anyother particle i.e can we use electron instead of proton?
- MUMTAZ (age 21)
KARGIL LADAKH J&K INDIA
A:
Sure you can.   In fact some of the first attempts to find the Higgs were performed at LEP the Large Electron-Positron collider at CERN in Geneva Switzerland.   Unfortunately, the energies at LEP were not quite high enough to produce the Higgs.  At the maximum energy of LEP, about 100 GeV/c2  they came close to the production threshold, which is 125 GeV/c2 .  Didn't quite make it...  The Large Hadron Collider, again at CERN, had proton-proton collisions at 7 Gev/c2 , more than sufficient.

LeeH

(published on 08/28/2012)