Although each collision at CERN has the available energy to create a Higgs boson each time, the vast majority of the time it does not create one. I suspect that part of the reason for this is that most of the energy goes into creating mostly lighter, secondary particles which carry a lot of kinetic energy away. As a result, this would leave very little energy left to create more massive Higgs bosons.
So I started thinking and realized that there is more that is going on (e.g. cross sections sizes). I have purposely left this question open-ended to just see what people are thinking since I know very little about this. Therefore, as the title of this question puts it: why is the Higgs boson not created more frequently at the CERN collider?
Aside: I guess I could of asked this question about some X-particle instead of the Higgs boson. Either way, my question would still be the same.
Best Answer
The Standard Model predicts that Higgs Bosons could be formed in a number of ways but the probability of producing a Higgs boson in any collision is always expected to be very small. If you make some assumptions you can estimate the rate. So based on the production rate at the LHC operating at 7 TeV. The total cross-section for producing a Higgs boson at the LHC is about 10 picobarn, while the total cross-section for a proton–proton collision is 110 millibarn. This would make only 1 Higgs boson per 10 billion collisions in the Large Hadron Collider. The rest is background. Even after CERN does its best analysis of a specific collision, they might decide that there was a 10% chance of it actually being a Higgs boson.
The key to discovery is collecting enough data so that there are many collisions each with a small probability of having a Higgs boson in them. Then using a statistical analysis, CERN can determine the presence of the Higgs boson.