# Higgs boson decays to Bottom/Anti-Bottom then what?

1. ### zincshow

94
The charts at CERN show calculations that a 126 GeV Higgs boson is expected to decay to a bottom/anti-bottom quark combination 56% of the time. Do they mean as an Upsilon Meson which decays in a certain pattern according to the wiki meson decay charts? Or, do they mean independent bottom and anti-bottom quarks, where the bottom quark decays into a charm or an up quark according to the wiki bottom quark page.

I fear I may have some confusion regarding the understanding of decays. Ie. after decaying to the bottom/anti-bottom pair, what is the most likely next decay product of the bottom/anti-bottom pair?

### Staff: Mentor

The Higgs boson cannot decay to an Upsilon meson, this would violate energy/momentum conservation.

The two quarks get separated (they have a total invariant energy of 126 GeV! Much more than the quark masses), both will end up in their own hadron, usually together with several other particles (as jets).
Those hadrons decay eventually (usually within a few millimeters), often in hadrons with a charm-quark, which decay again.

The signatures in the detector are two groups of hadrons in the detector (plus whatever the remaining proton-proton collision produces). Sometimes, the decay of the hadron with the b-quark can be reconstructed.

3. ### Bill_K

4,160
The way to tell that a bottom quark was produced is: B-tagging.