Matter and antimatter should annihilate each other completely releasing energy in the form of photon, however it is discovered that smashing electron and positron together can also spew out higgs boson! I suspect if you smash particles hard enough the extra energy can be convert into massive particle and I like to know if higgs boson which is spin 0 and no charge will always be produced when there is surplus of energy in every type of collision? am I right?
-
1$\begingroup$ Regarding the LHC tag: this machine collides protons. An example of an electron-positron collider would be LEP (at CERN) or PETRA (at DESY). $\endgroup$– Oscar BravoCommented Jan 17, 2019 at 13:19
-
$\begingroup$ Related: physics.stackexchange.com/questions/451323/… $\endgroup$– PM 2RingCommented Jan 17, 2019 at 13:57
1 Answer
Your initial premise is: Matter and antimatter [should] annihilate each other completely releasing energy in the form of photon. This is incorrect.
Rather, an electron-positron collision will annihilate both particles and produce a boson. A boson is a class of particle, one of which is a photon. But you can also produce other bosons, such as the Higgs or a $Z^{0}$.
It is the boson that subsequently decays to form the shower of particles we detect. It is from the rate, shape and distribution of these showers that we determine what boson was originally present.
These processes are usually visualised by drawing Feynman Diagrams.