Nature's hadron collider produces Higgs bosons all the time | Life & Physics

Cosmic rays provide a free source of high-energy collisions, which have been used in the past to discover new particles. A recent study calculates how often they produce Higgs bosons

On Wednesday the whole of year six from my daughter's primary school came to visit UCL. They saw the Slade School of Fine Art, the department of Earth Sciences and finally my department, Physics & Astronomy. That's two classes of 30 children each, and for those of you not familiar with today's jargon, 'year six' is ages 10 and 11. Or 'fourth year juniors', as we were called in my day.

The first thing I showed them was a cosmic ray detector. It was ticking away in on the bench at irregular intervals, about one tick per second, and an oscilloscope trace was registering each pulse.