Who gets their mass from the Higgs?

phys.org ^ | June 4, 2018, | A. M. Sirunyan

[BenLurkin]

The Higgs field is like an endless ocean through which all matter swims. Some particles are like sponges and sop up mass as they lumber along, while others are as sprightly as tiny minnows and dart right through.

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"We know that the Higgs interacts with massive force-carrying particles, like the W boson, because that's how we originally discovered it," said scientist Patty McBride ... "Now we're trying to understand its relationship with fermions."

Fermions are particles that click together to form the invisible scaffolding inside atoms. Bosons, on the other hand, are the physical manifestation of forces and perform tasks such as gluing fermions together.

In June 2014, scientists on the CMS experiment published a paper in Nature showing that the Higgs boson has a relationship with fermions by measuring the rate at which it decays into tau leptons, a heavier cousin of the electron. Later, both the CMS and ATLAS experiments found evidence of the Higgs boson decaying into bottom quarks. Now, scientists are tackling its relationship with the top quark.

"The relationship between the Higgs and the top quark is particularly interesting because the top quark is the most massive particle ever discovered," McBride said. "As the 'giver of mass,' the Higgs boson should be enormously fond of the top quark."

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"A top quark decays almost exclusively into a bottom quark and a W boson," Neu said. "The Higgs boson, on the other hand, has a rich spectrum of decay modes, including decays to pairs of bottom quarks, W bosons, tau leptons, photons and several others. This leads to a wide variety of signatures in events with two top quarks and a Higgs boson. We pursued each of these and combined the results to produce our final analysis."

[politicianslie]

I think a better student lecture might be to imagine the audience are all Democrats. No dumber group has ever existed.