In search of the Higgs boson: H -> gamma gamma

<!--HTML-->In Geneva, FIU artist Xavier Cortada and physicist Pete Markowitz delivered an Art-Science talk during the CERN CMS Week Conference, created a site-specific installation at the CMS experiment venue and engaged 300 scientists from around the world in a performance art piece that transformed them into the very subatomic particles they research.<br/> In the piece, they invite scientists to participate by wearing a cap with LED lights, showing one of the 6 colors which represent the flavors of the quarks. The physicists themselves then take the role of the quarks inside a proton with the building serving as the confining (proton) walls. Through their social interactions each scientist will mimic the natural interactions studied in the experiment below.<br/> Working together, Cortada and Markowitz developed a permanent art installation to be unveiled at the vernissage. The installation's five banners give the different strategies to sift through the voluminous collisions recorded by the CMS experiment in the search for the Higgs-like particle. The foreground of each five-meter long banner shows an event which is a possible candidate for each of these different decays of the Higgs-like particle to a final state: two photons, two Z, two W, two bottom quarks or two tau leptons. The backgrounds reflect the additional breadth of the physics program. Each depicts selected pages from every article published by the collaboration. In a very real sense, the banners serve as an homage to the CMS collaboration's more than 4000 scientists and engineers whose work is diseminated through those very publications. At the same time the complexity of the work illustrates the challenge in paring down the myriad of interactions to select those scatterings which might have produced a Higgs boson.<br/> The resulting exhibit is about honoring the people who have increased our understanding of the universe -- those scientists, engineers, technicians and others from around the entire planet whose work and names are showcased in these banners. The connections between their work downstairs and the people themselves is brought out in both the banners and the performance. In the performance piece, the physicists become their work. In each banner, their work becomes art.<br/> The art banners (created by digitally manipulating models, publications, logos and charts produced by the CMS collaboration) evokes the CMS experiment's dual legacy: inspiring a future generation of scientists by building upon the work of those who came before.