The Hunt for the Higgs Boson

Abstract

Since the discovery of the top quark, which took place in 1995 at the Tevatron collider at Fermilab, the Higgs boson may be considered the last missing piece of the Standar Model. Its search has been undertaken at the LEP and Tevatron colliders, but no evidence of its existence was found, at the energies which were probed. The mass of the Higgs boson is an unconstrained parameter of the theory, therefore a collider which is able to explore vast energy ranges is cardinal for its discovery. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN has been designed with the aim of providing conclusive scientifical results regarding the existence of the Higgs boson. This chapter provides a quick but accurate introduction to the current theoretical panorama in elementary particle physics: we will describe the Standard Model, the motivations which bring to the introduction of the Higgs mechanism, and its consequences. We will then summarize the experimental limits on the Higgs boson mass previous to the Large Hadron Collider, and introduce the \(\mathrm{H}\rightarrow \mathrm{ZZ} \rightarrow \ell ^{+}\ell ^{-}\mathrm{q}\bar{\mathrm{q}}\) decay channel, and the role it plays in the search for this elusive particle.