A fascinating tour of particle physics from Nobel Prize winner Leon Lederman. At the root of particle physics is an invincible sense of curiosity. Leon Lederman embraces this spirit of inquiry as he moves from the Greeks' earliest scientific observations to Einstein and beyond to chart this unique arm of scientific study. His survey concludes with the Higgs boson, nicknamed the God Particle, which scientists hypothesize will help unlock the last secrets of the subatomic universe, quarks and all--it's the dogged pursuit of this almost mystical entity that inspires Lederman's witty and accessible history.

The theoretical foundations of the Standard Model of elementary particles relies on the existence of the Higgs boson, a particle which has been revealed for the first time by the experiments run at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2012. As the Higgs boson is an unstable particle, its search strategies were based on its decay products. In this thesis, Francesco Pandolfi conducted a search for the Higgs boson in the H → ZZ → l + l - qq Decay Channel with 4.6 fb -1 of 7 TeV proton-proton collision data collected by the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment. The presence of jets in the final state poses a series of challenges to the experimenter: both from a technical point of view, as jets are complex objects and necessitate of ad-hoc reconstruction techniques, and from an analytical one, as backgrounds with jets are copious at hadron colliders, therefore analyses must obtain high degrees of background rejection in order to achieve competitive sensitivity. This is accomplished by following two directives: the use of an angular likelihood discriminant, capable of discriminating events likely to originate from the decay of a scalar boson from non-resonant backgrounds, and by using jet parton flavor tagging, selecting jets compatible with quark hadronization and discarding jets more likely to be initiated by gluons. The events passing the selection requirements in 4.6 fb -1 of data collected by the CMS detector are examined, in the search of a possible signal compatible with the decay of a heavy Higgs boson. The thesis describes the statistical tools and the results of this analysis. This work is a paradigm for studies of the Higgs boson with final states with jets. The non-expert physicists will enjoy a complete and eminently readable description of a proton-proton collider analysis. At the same time, the expert reader will learn the details of the searches done with jets at CMS.

This first open access volume of the handbook series contains articles on the standard model of particle physics, both from the theoretical and experimental perspective. It also covers related topics, such as heavy-ion physics, neutrino physics and searches for new physics beyond the standard model. A joint CERN-Springer initiative, the "Particle Physics Reference Library" provides revised and updated contributions based on previously published material in the well-known Landolt-Boernstein series on particle physics, accelerators and detectors (volumes 21A, B1,B2,C), which took stock of the field approximately one decade ago. Central to this new initiative is publication under full open access

The recent observation of the Higgs boson has been hailed as the scientific discovery of the century and led to the 2013 Nobel Prize in physics. This book describes the detailed science behind the decades-long search for this elusive particle at the Large Electron Positron Collider at CERN and at the Tevatron at Fermilab and its subsequent discovery and characterization at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Written by physicists who played leading roles in this epic search and discovery, this book is an authoritative and pedagogical exposition of the portrait of the Higgs boson that has emerged from a large number of experimental measurements. As the first of its kind, this book should be of interest to graduate students and researchers in particle physics.

The book gives a quite complete and up-to-date picture of the Standard Theory with an historical perspective, with a collection of articles written by some of the protagonists of present particle physics. The theoretical developments are described together with the most up-to-date experimental tests, including the discovery of the Higgs Boson and the measurement of its mass as well as the most precise measurements of the top mass, giving the reader a complete description of our present understanding of particle physics.