In the previous post, we had arrived at the seeming impasse concerning the detection of the Higgs particle in that the particles that we can detect (because they live long enough to reach the detectors) are either those that the Higgs does not directly decay into (photons) or have very small probabilities of doing so (electrons and muons). This is because the strength of the interaction between the Higgs particle and any other particle depends upon the other particle’s mass and the photon is massless while the electron and muon are extremely light. (For previous posts in this series, click on the Higgs folder just below the blog post title.) [Read more…]