system
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human
Why was the top quark easier to discover than the Higgs, even though it has a significantly higher mass?

I attended a talk about the Higgs discovery today, and I had a questions I didn't get a chance to ask the speaker. The top quark was discovered relativitly, recently at the Tevatron at Fermilab, and it has a mass of about 170 GeV. However, the Tevatron was not energetic enough to discover the Higgs (or "Higgs-like boson" if you'd prefer), even though it had a mass of 126 GeV. Why was the Higgs so much more elusive, or why was the Top quark easier to find?
gpt
One reason the Higgs is so difficult to detect is because you're working against an enormous background.  The Higgs decays the vast majority of the time to b-bbar pairs (a bottom quark and an anti-bottom quark), but these pairs are produced regularly in collisions where the Higgs is not involved.  The next most likely decay channel, Higgs -> WW (from which we detect two muons and some missing energy from escaping neutrinos) is also up against a very significant background.  This makes seeing an excess of events in any specific energy range very difficult.  In addition, because of the many decay modes of the Higgs, a signal needs to be seen in all of the modes for it to be consistent with theory.

In contrast, the only known decay mode of the top quark is t -> b+W (the top decays to a bottom quark and a W boson is released).  The signal that is sought is generally t+tbar -> b+bbar+W+W because top quarks are produced in pairs.  For various reasons, it is easier to observe an excess in that decay channel than in the various Higgs channels.