The search for the Higgs Boson was one of the main reasons for building the Large Hadron Collider. Finding the Higgs Boson would give an incredible leap to our understanding of how the universe was created, helping us answer the fundamental questions of how and why stars, planets and people came to exist at all. The Higgs Boson is proving difficult to detect because it isn’t visible long enough to be photographed. Scientists can’t catch one, but they can look for evidence that one has been in the detector. Like an exploding firework, it leaves a particular display, with different particles behaving a bit like different kinds of firework. What makes the job of analyzing them so complicated, is that billions of these fireworks are going off every second, and many of them look very similar!

The simplest example in the sounds library is HiggsJetSimple . This example maps properties of the Higgs jet to properties of sound as illustrated in the picture above. A jet is made up of lots of cells containing energy deposits. Each cell has an energy, a distance and an angular distance (dR) associated with it. So each cell can be heard as a separate note in this example. This is quite a long track (about 90 seconds). The sounds reduce in density very much towards the end, with isolated events separated by silences of several seconds.

HiggsJetMotif  is made using exactly the same technique and corresponds to exactly the same jet. The difference is that in this case the data is used to shape an existing sound, which in this example is the sound of running water. You can hear the original running water sound and read more about how this is done here.

HiggsJetHarmSig2  is something a bit different. The jet is taken apart and reassembled three times, corresponding to the the three sounds you hear (each lasting 20 seconds). In the first case the cells' dR values are mapped to pitch and then all the cells (notes) are played together. The second sound has pitch determined by distance and the third sound has pitch determined by energy. These are the `harmonic signatures' of the jet.

You can listen to more Higgs sounds here.