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The Data for Higgs Boson Decaying to two photons

The decays to two photons (H → γ+γ) have much larger backgrounds, but the signal clearly stands out.


The bottom plot shows the same data, but with the background subtracted out, so you only see the signal. Now the bump at around 125 GeV is even more apparent! © CERN

This is another invariant mass histogram, but this time for the Higgs decaying to two photons. As you can see, the background is very large compared to the previous plot. That's because there are many more processes that produce two photons than four leptons.

The dashed red line represents the background, while the solid red line represents the sum of the background and signal. As you can see, the data agree very well with a new particle at around 125 GeV.