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What is the Mass of the Boson?

Unfortunately, the theory that predicted its existence didn't specify the mass of the Higgs boson. As the years went by it became clear that the Higgs boson would be extremely massive, and most likely beyond the reach of all machines built prior to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Remember that since E=mc2, the higher a particle's mass, the more energy we need to produce one.

By the time the LHC started collecting data in 2010, experiments at other accelerators had shown that the mass of a Higgs boson had to be greater than about 115 GeV/c2. The LHC experiments planned to search for evidence anywhere in the mass range 115-600 GeV/c2 or even up to 1,000 GeV/c2.



Each year, experiments were able to exclude a Higgs of higher and higher mass. In 1990, they knew the Higgs mass had to be greater than about 25 GeV/c2, and by 2003 it had to be greater than about 115 GeV/c2.