Image from the Higgs Hunters database Higgs Hunters

The discovery of the Higgs boson back in 2012 was a landmark moment for physicists -- but what happens when the elementary particle vanishes could be even more exciting. Physicists working at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are now recruiting an army of online volunteers to make the next big breakthrough.

Higgs Hunters, a joint project between UK and US scientists working on the Atlas experiment, is an online repository of 25,000 images from the LHC.


Scientists hope that "weird" things spotted by volunteers will help them understand what happens when a Higgs boson dies.

We want volunteers to help us go beyond the Higgs boson barrier by examining pictures of these collisions and telling us what they see. Alan Barr, Oxford University department of physics

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When people look at images on Higgs Hunters they are seeing snapshots of newborn particles flying at close to the speed of light through a huge underground detector. The images, taken shortly after the creation of the elusive Higgs boson, show the particle rapidly decaying as new particles are born. It is believed that these could include a new type of previously unobserved particle.

Volunteers are being asked to look at images and say how many lines they can see emanating from the collision at the centre.

Higgs Hunters comes with an in-depth tutorial to help people understand exactly what scientists are looking for. "We want volunteers to help us go beyond the Higgs boson barrier by examining pictures of these collisions and telling us what they see," Alan Barr of Oxford University's department of physics and lead scientists on Higgs Hunters tells WIRED.co.uk.


Installing the ATLAS calorimeter_Photo Courtesy of CERN Particle Fever

"The collisions at CERN have been analysed by computers, but only a handful of them have actually been looked at by human eyes. Some of the greatest discoveries in science have been made when someone noticed something odd or unexpected," Barr explains. "People are amazingly good at spotting odd and unusual things that the computer algorithms may have missed."

It is hoped that with a large number of volunteers each looking at a handful of images it will only take a few weeks for all the images to be scanned. Barr and his colleagues are excited by the prospect of online volunteers assisting in a major scientific discovery. "Anything unusual or unexpected spotted by the volunteers will be the subject of special attention by the Atlas scientists when the LHC restarts at even higher energy early next year. It would be amazing if the next big discovery about the fundamental make-up of the universe was started by someone at home saying 'That looks weird'."