Recently, the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) jointly released an important measurement of Higgs boson pair (HH) production. Nanjing University's ATLAS team, particularly Associate Professor Rui Zhang, made leading and key contributions to the research.

Searching for and measuring Higgs self-coupling is crucial for understanding electroweak symmetry breaking and exploring the early evolution of the universe. It is regarded as the next milestone in Higgs physics. HH production is the most sensitive probe for directly measuring this self-coupling.

The study, titled "Combination of ATLAS and CMS searches for Higgs boson pair production at 13 TeV," was published in Physical Review Letters and selected as an Editors' Suggestion. The measured HH signal is about 0.8 (^+0.9_-0.7) times the theoretical prediction--the most precise measurement of this process to date--and constrains the Higgs self-coupling strength to between -0.71 and 6.1 times the Standard Model prediction, testing the Standard Model with unprecedented precision.

Publication link: http://Phys. Rev. Lett. 137, 131803, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/27s7-2frt