Breakthrough Discovery Links Two of the Heaviest Known Particles

Presented by Office of Public Affairs and Communications

The two heaviest known particles — the Higgs boson and the top quark — have finally been linked, thanks to a discovery based on experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).

Two of the particle detector experiments at the LHC detected simultaneous production of the two particles during a rare subatomic process. Several physicists from the University of Notre Dame’s Department of Physics were named as contributors to the discovery, and were aided by researchers at Notre Dame’s Center for Research Computing and the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.