Images Dated 9th May 1995

Simulation of Higgs boson production

Simulated detection of Higgs boson. Computer simulation of an event in which the decay of a Higgs boson particle produces four muons. Two of these muons are seen here (green tracks). The muons, along with countless other particles (red and blue tracks), are produced in a head-on collision between two protons. The Higgs boson is a localised clustering in the Higgs Field. This field permeates space, and local distortions of the Higgs Field are thought to be the way that particles gain mass. This image shows how the Higgs boson might be seen in the CMS detector on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory

© DAVID PARKER/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY