Last week, at the Rencontres de Moriond conference, the ATLAS Collaboration brought physicists a step closer to understanding the nature of the electroweak symmetry-breaking mechanism.

The ATLAS Collaboration announces the first observation of “VVZ production” – a rare combination of three massive vector bosons produced simultaneously at the LHC.

Vector boson scattering processes play a special role within the Standard Model, as they are closely related to the Higgs mechanism and can proceed via an exchange of a Higgs boson. By studying these processes, ATLAS physicists are exploring multiple new-physics models, including anomalous self-interactions of the W bosons and extended Higgs sector with additional Higgs bosons.

In 2017, the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations announced the detection of a never-before-observed process: vector boson scattering.