Search for the Higgs Boson: a Statistical Adventure of Exclusion and Discovery

Abstract

The 40 years old Standard Model, the theory of particle physics, seems to describe all experimental data very well. All of its elementary particles were identified and studied apart from the Higgs boson until 2012. For decades many experiments were built and operated searching for it, and finally, the two main experiments of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, CMS and ATLAS, in 2012 observed a new particle with properties close to those predicted for the Higgs boson. In this talk we describe the search process: the exclusion of the Higgs boson at LEP, the Large Electron Positron collider, and the observation at LHC of a new boson with properties close to those predicted for the Higgs boson of the Standard Model. We try to pay special attention on the statistical methods used.