If scientists were already able to discover and study the Higgs boson, what is the benefit of doing the experiment at higher speeds? And even though natural collisions happen at higher speeds, is there any unique risk to this specifically when manufactured by humans?

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If scientists were already able to discover and study the Higgs boson, what is the benefit of doing the experiment at higher speeds? And even though natural collisions happen at higher speeds, is there any unique risk to this specifically when manufactured by humans?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Increasing the energy could be not so useful (at this moment) to measure the things about the Higgs boson.

The Higgs production is very improbable so needs more luminosity (more collision in a second), not more energy (in fact CERN plans to improve luminosity for the next 20 years, not energy).
For example, one thing that the physicist is currently searching for is the decay of the Higgs in two muons. This decay, with the current luminosity, occurs approximately 30 times a year and the detector sees millions of particles in a single second. To distinguish the two muons produced by the Higgs from the muons produced by other things more data and more luminosity are needed.

One of the most important parameters to measure (that needs a lot of data) is the so-called “self-coupling”. The Higgs interacts with himself so he can decay in another two Higgs. Maybe physicists will be able to perform such measurements in 15/20 years

For the second question: no. Collisions with much more energy than collisions at CERN occur continuously in nature and there is no difference between “natural” collision and “human-made” collision. The physics is the same. The colliders were built because we need a lot of data and we need to measure the particles near the collision point, we can’t just observe cosmic particles (but there are other experiments that do)

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