Ten years ago today, the existence of the elusive particle associated with an invisible mass giving field was announced. Prof Bortoletto's memories are still fresh.
I don't remember much else. Everybody was happy. She said that she was surprised by how many people were interested.
Experts are hoping to uncover further secrets of the fundamental building blocks of the universe when the Large Hadron collider starts its third period of data collection on Tuesday.
The moment two weeks before the announcement when the researchers unblinded their analysis of the data and saw unambiguous signs was when Bortoletto remembers the most.
She wants the butterflies in her stomach. It was mind blowing. It is a special moment in the life of a scientist.
Newspapers, radio and TV all focused on a particle as fleeting as it was important when the discovery was announced.
The signature particle of the Higgs field is called the "God particle" and is named after physicist Peter Higgs. It is the interaction of fundamental particles with this field that gives them mass.
The standard model, a key theory that explains three out of the four fundamental forces of nature, was the one that predicted the existence of the Higgs boson.
Scientists are able to explain a host of phenomena, from why electrons have mass and hence can create a cloud around a nucleus to why a neutron is more massive than a protons.
Why we exist is explained by the Higgs field. The fact that we can put it in a context that we understand is cool.
The story isn't done. Since the announcement in 2012 there have been further revelations, including insights into how the boson is born and decays, and its interactions with heavy particles. Work continues at a rapid pace.
Scientists are hoping to study interactions between the muons and the Higgs boson in order to find out more about the nature of the particle.
The shape of the Higgs potential could be better understood with the help of the self-coupling.
The third run of the LHC is expected to start on Tuesday. The atom smasher will operate at 13.6 trillion electronvolts, up from 13 TeV, with Bortoletto revealing the Atlas andCMS experiments are expected to double their dataset.
Bortoletto said that more data and more energy opens new opportunities. She said that scientists would be able to study the mass of the W boson in more detail. The W boson was at the center of a sensation earlier this year when researchers at the collider detector at the US revealed their data suggested the particle has a far greater mass than predicted.
There was room for more discoveries.
She said there is a lot of scope. Every time we go higher in energy, we have a chance to find something new.
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