On July 4, CMS and ATLAS announced the discovery of a Higgs-like resonance. An unstable boson quickly turns into other more stable particles, in this case the clearest signal shows up in the boson decaying to two photons or four charged particles like electrons, muons, and their antiparticles. The two experiments saw a characteristic enhancement (a.k.a. a resonance or “bump”) in both of these types of decays.

An single event in the detector that may have been the two photons resulting from decay of the resonance.

The boson shows upas a bump the distribution of two photon decays.