The Dark Side of the Higgs

The recently detected Higgs boson may act as a link between particles we are familiar with and also particles that have so far avoided detection, such as dark matter. To investigate this possibility, a new study has searched through data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for events where a Higgs boson decays into “invisible particles,” which leave no trace in LHC’s detectors. The ATLAS collaboration, reporting in Physical Review Letters, finds that the probability of these types of events does not exceed values predicted by the standard model, a result they use to severely constrain theories based on low-mass dark matter particles.