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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

> Colliding electron and positron beams could have implications in fundamental physics. For example, they could create a higher rate of Higgs bosons than the LHC can, allowing physicists to better study its properties.

Didn't the Large Electron-Positron Collider fail to detect evidence of the Higgs Boson?

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It got close, but it was limited by its design/diameter, such are the woes of synchroton radiation and accelerating the lighter charged particles. As far as I know they pushed its limits all they could (burning it) before shutting it down to replace it with the LHC. Too bad really, as the nicest accelerator for studying the properties of a Higgs is an e+e- collider and at some point at least one will/should be built. The LHC was built because something new had to show up at around 1TeV tops, it was either a Higgs boson or new physics (not all the energy of the pp collision is available for say a qq collision, because quarks are in a bound state, 14 TeV for pp at the LHC means approx 2 TeV for Higgs or new stuff).

> Didn't the Large Electron-Positron Collider fail to detect evidence of the Higgs Boson?

It didn't produce a negative result. In fact, they were seeing some small hints of something around 114 GeV right as they shut down for the LHC construction.

(Just for completeness)

The hints at 114GeV in LEP were very subtle and have since been shown to be a statistical fluctuation (which is unsurprising). The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has observed the Higgs boson at 125GeV. This mass is too high for LEP to have ever seen without further upgrades to boost it's energy and there was no reason to expect it to be as close as it is to the LEP energy. It could easily have been 200GeV+ and well outside of LEP's capabilities.

The advantage of the LHC is that is was capable of much higher energies due to being a proton collider (currently 13000GeV), though this comes at the cost of being "messier" to analyse the data. Additionally, continuing to run LEP to check would have further delayed the LHC which would have been very expensive.

https://home.cern/topics/higgs-boson

"On 4 July 2012, the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider announced they had each observed a new particle in the mass region around 126 GeV. This particle is consistent with the Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model."

https://timeline.web.cern.ch/timelines/The-Large-Hadron-Coll...

https://home.cern/about/accelerators/large-electron-positron...

"LEP – the largest electron-positron accelerator ever built – was dismantled in 2000. Its 27-kilometre tunnel now hosts the LHC"

http://medicinemag.net/science/2091/a-simple-antimatter-acce...

That says the LHC found it, not the LEP.

No, it succeeded in confirming the existence of the Higgs boson. In fact, that's largely the reason Higgs and Englert were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013.

LEP[1] did no such thing, you're talking about the LHC.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Electron%E2%80%93Positro...

Wow, I misread the OPs comment as the LHC also and thought I was experiencing the mandela effect haha.

No the LHC is a Large Hadron Collider, the previous collider was LEP a Large Electron Proton collider. They plan to build a linear electron proton collider similar to SLAC at some point.

Positron (the antimatter counterpart to the electron) not Proton (the positive particle in the nucleus of ordinary atoms).

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