Higgs animations

The news recently from the LHC experiments hasn't been very exciting for my colleagues on the particle theory side of things (see for instance here for summaries and discussion). But via the clever chaps at ATLAS we do have a series of very nice gif animations showing how the evidence for the existence of the Higgs changed with time, as they collected more and more data.

This example shows the development of one plot, for the Higgs-to-gamma-gamma channel:

That's pretty cool. Also nice to see the gif format being put to better use than endless animations of cats doing silly things! (Though if you are a PhD student, you might find this use of gifs amusing ... )

Here's another one, this time for the decay channel to 4 leptons:

Note that in this case the scale on the y axis is also changing with time! There's a version of this animation with a fixed axis here, and one of the gamma-gamma channel with a floating axis here.