Sighting the Higgs in its favourite decay
ATLAS sees the first LHC evidence of the Higgs boson decaying to a pair of b-quarks. Despite being the dominant Higgs decay, finding evidence in this channel was a major challenge. Following years of dedicated search, ATLAS was able to spot this elusive decay in 2017, with an observed significance of 3.6 σ (expectation 4.0 σ) when combining the Run 1 and Run 2 datasets.
Timeline