… and I am not really talking about the Higgs status presentations yesterday at CERN, even though I have to admit that this has us all abuzz with excitement and speculations about the possibilities. And, the excitement is spreading to the general public: Today, the biggest newspaper in Munich, the “Sueddeutsche Zeitung”, has an LHC event display on the front page, above the fold.
Simulated Higgs decay into 2 muons at a 3 TeV CLIC collider, for an assumed Higgs mass of 120 GeV.
Although nothing really has changed (yet), the world feels a bit different today. Not a bad starting point for a colloquium on a possible future project in particle physics, a high-energy linear e+e- collider, which I’ll be giving in Prague this afternoon. Higgs physics is high on the list of things to do at such a machine, which promises to provide very precise measurements of its properties, and its coupling to other particles, which will show us its connection to particle masses. Some of these measurements have been studied in some detail for the CLIC conceptual design report just recently, which shows that, given enough luminosity and running time, even the very rare decay of a Higgs particle going into two muons might be measurable, with a statistical precision of a bit better than 25%.
Lets see how the LHC results develop, they might give us a whole new field to study…
