This book provides a general description of the search for and discovery of the Higgs boson (particle) at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. The goal is to provide a relatively brief overview of the issues, instruments and techniques relevant for this search; written by a physicist who was directly involved. The Higgs boson mat be the one particle that was studied the most before its discovery and the story from postulation in 1964 to detection in 2012 is a fascinating one. The story is told here while detailing the fundamentals of particle physics.

This second open access volume of the handbook series deals with detectors, large experimental facilities and data handling, both for accelerator and non-accelerator based experiments. It also covers applications in medicine and life sciences. 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 ATLAS detector at the CERN Large Hadron Collider is an apparatus of unprecedented complexity, designed to probe physics in proton-proton collisions at centre-of-mass energies up to 14 TeV. It was installed in its underground cavern at the LHC during the period 2004 to 2008. Testing of individual subsystems began immediately with calibration systems and cosmic rays, and by 2008 full detector systems could be operated with the planned infrastructure, readout, and monitoring systems. Several commissioning runs of the full detector were organized in 2008 and 2009. During these runs the detector was operated continuously for several months with its readout triggered by cosmic ray muons. At the same time, regular calibrations of individual detector systems were made. In the course of these runs, signals from tens of millions of cosmic ray events were recorded. These commissioning runs continued until the first beam-beam collisions in late 2009. This volume is a collection of seven performance papers based on data collected during this commissioning period. Five papers deal with the response of individual detector systems. One paper describes the performance of the simulation infrastructure used to model the detector’s response to both cosmic rays and to the later beam-beam collisions. The final paper describes measurements drawing on the integrated performance of several detector systems. It studies lepton identification, the response to low energy electrons, muon energy loss in the calorimeters, missing ET effects, and the combined performance for muons when both the muon spectrometer and the inner tracking detector are used. These papers summarize the studies of the ATLAS detector performance and readiness prior to the start of colliding beam data. They are reprinted from The European Physical Journal C where they were published between summer 2010 and spring 2011.

This thesis presents a search for long-lived particles decaying into displaced electrons and/or muons with large impact parameters. This signature provides unique sensitivity to the production of theoretical lepton-partners, sleptons. These particles are a feature of supersymmetric theories, which seek to address unanswered questions in nature. The signature searched for in this thesis is difficult to identify, and in fact, this is the first time it has been probed at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It covers a long-standing gap in coverage of possible new physics signatures. This thesis describes the special reconstruction and identification algorithms used to select leptons with large impact parameters and the details of the background estimation. The results are consistent with background, so limits on slepton masses and lifetimes in this model are calculated at 95% CL, drastically improving on the previous best limits from the Large Electron Positron Collider (LEP).

This first book to critically summarize the latest achievements and emerging applications within this interdisciplinary topic focuses on one of the most important types of detectors for elementary particles and photons: resistive plate chambers (RPCs). In the first part, the outstanding, international team of authors comprehensively describes and presents the features and design of single and double-layer RPCs before covering more advanced multi-layer RPCs. The second part then focuses on the application of RPCs in high energy physics, materials science, medicine and security. Throughout, the experienced authors adopt a didactic approach, with each subject presented in a simple way, increasing in complexity step by step.