Technicolor based ideas of gauge symmetry breaking and fermion mass generation now becomes less appealing. This is the first elementary particle, which has been discovered in a laboratory, which has zero intrinsic spin. We know that mass and spin are the two quadratic casimir invariants of the Lorentz group. In this sense it is complementary to photon which has zero mass and spin one.
The spin zero nature of Higgs makes it hard to trace (just as it is hard to see God). The strategy then was to look into two types of final states in proton proton collisions; (i) The diphoton final state (ii) The four lepton final state. Analysis of these channels revealed an excess of 5σ significance over background for a Higgs mass of 125 GeV or so. This was confirmed by two independent groups namely ATLAS and CMS.
This was a difficult search of the microscopic world which was successful. This increases the general appreciation for the subject "Collider Physics" many times.
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