BREAKING NEWS: This week, the Nobel Prize Committee selected theoretical physicists Peter W. Higgs, Great Britain; and Francois Englert, Belgium, to share the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the Higgs boson, or “God particle."

While the committee recognized the long hard work of the thousands of researchers at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider to find the Higgs boson, there was no way to single out the work of any one group of researchers. But we can. Ohio State physicists played a key role in the discovery and were in on the hunt for the Higgs from the beginning--designing, building and running the two Large Hadron detectors—ATLAS and CMS—that found the Higgs. This is their story:

FLASHBACK: Everyone remembers that in July, 2012, officials at CERN (home of the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, in Geneva, Switzerland) announced the sensational news that a “Higgs-like boson” had been found.

What most people don’t know is that this was not “news” to our high-energy experimental physicists working at CERN. They had played a key role in finding this elusive fundamental, subatomic particle months earlier.

Our physicists dedicated decades to design and build hardware for experiments; working on the LHC’s ATLAS and CMS detectors that focused exclusively on finding the Higgs.

Stan Durkin heads CMS Endcap Muon detector electronics and has been involved with CMS since 1994. Durkin, T.Y. Ling (now retired), and Benjamin Bylsma designed and constructed its Cathode Strip Chamber (CSC) electronics.

Christopher Hill, the CMS deputy physics coordinator overseeing all analyses on the CMS detector, became part of Ohio State’s CMS team in 2010.

K.K. Gan, Richard Kass and Harris Kagan joined the ATLAS detector team in 1998. Kass, Kagan and Gan helped build its pixel detector, or “camera”—think of a digital camera on steroids— capable of capturing subatomic particles created by the collisions by measuring the trajectory of charged particles, including the ones that come from the decay of the Higgs.

FAST-FORWARD: It is now more than a full year since the announcement of the discovery of a Higgs-like boson. The Higgs discovery was confirmed by peer review in September 2012, but CERN scientists were reluctant to drop the “like” modifier after the word Higgs, until many more tests were run. Finally, on March 14, 2013, CERN announced that the particle described eight months earlier was indeed, a Higgs boson.

The LHC shut down on Feb 16, 2013 for a two- year period to revamp the magnets around the 27 Km circumference LHC ring. This will significantly bump-up its collision energy from the present 8 TeV to the final design energy of 14 TeV when data-taking resumes in early 2015.

OHIO STATE’S HIGGS DETECTIVES: NEWS FROM THE FRONTLINE.

THE ATLAS DETECTOR TEAM: Faculty (Gan, Kagan, Kass); postdocs Josh Moss, Yi Yang, and Renat Ishmukhametov; and graduate students Hayes Meritt, Kristina Looper, Ben Tannenwald, and David Pignotti are busy building and installing upgrades to the ATLAS experiment.

They are helped by a recent grant from the National Science Foundation. “This MRI award will allow us to buy state of the art equipment to be used for research and development,” Richard Kass said. “For one thing, we will be able to design and fabricate a much faster optical readout system to enhance the physics capability of the ATLAS experiment.

“The big highlight since last year's discovery of a ‘Higgs like particle’ is that now everyone can call it a ‘Higgs particle.’ Many of the characteristics of this particle have been measured over the past several months and so it appears to be the simplest Higgs particle predicted by the Standard Model.

“I say ‘simplest’ because many different versions of Higgs particles have been proposed over the last thirty years.”

THE CMS DETECTOR TEAM: Faculty Durkin, Hill, Bylsma, Richard Hughes and Brian Winer; postdocs Jamie Antonelli, Darren Puigh, Wells Wulsin, Carl Vuosalo and Khristian Kotov; and graduate students, Bingxuan Liu, Jeffry Smith, Marissa Rodenburg, Jessica Brinson and Andrew Hart are in the middle of an upgrade of the endcap muon electronics to improve particle measurement in the high intensity forward region.

“The new data supports that the boson seen has the properties one would expect from the Standard Model Higgs theory, but questions remain,” Durkin said.

“While the Standard Model is incredibly successful, we know it is incomplete—for instance, astrophysicists have shown that dark matter permeates the universe; studying the properties of the Higgs may lead to understanding dark matter.

“With the increased LHC energy, data- taking in 2015 should be very exciting.”

Christopher Hill reported, “Since July we’ve produced lots more Higgs-bosons, been able to do better measurements, and have about four times as much data.

“Last summer the question was: does the particle have all the properties it should have? So far it looks exactly like our expectations of the Higgs.

“We have been doing a lot of lab measurements and been checking that the math works the way it is supposed to. And, yes; it decays the way it should—its mass, spin, parity, coupling to other particles—all look like the theory that Higgs made up. It confirms the Standard Model, but there are still old questions to answer. When the LHC is up and running again, we will be better able to tackle them.”

FINDING THE HIGGS—Is Only the Beginning