Does The Higgs Boson ‘God Particle’ Exist? Scientists At CERN Believe So.

Two international teams of scientists working at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider have found hints of the existence of the Higgs boson.

AsianScientist (Dec. 16, 2011) – Two international teams of scientists working at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland have taken an important step towards the discovery of the elusive Higgs boson.

Scientists working independently on two giant detectors at the LHC, named CMS and ATLAS respectively, reported this week that they have found hints of the existence of the Higgs boson.

The Higgs boson is a theoretical sub-atomic particle that physicists predict will explain why matter has mass, and is sometimes also referred to as the ‘God particle.’

It is named after British physicist Peter Higgs, who postulated in 1964 that a field somewhat similar to an electromagnetic field might give particles their mass.

In this scenario, particles acquire mass by interacting with the Higgs field, and directly observing the related Higgs boson particle in experiments would provide evidence that the Higgs field exists.

There has so far been no experimental evidence confirming the existence of the Higgs boson, despite large efforts invested in accelerator experiments at CERN and Fermilab.

Although the results are not enough to make any conclusive statement on the existence or non-existence of the Higgs boson, they are a significant step forward in the search for the elusive particle.

Tantalizing hints have been seen in the ranges 116-130 GeV by the ATLAS experiment and 115-127 GeV by CMS, but these are not yet strong enough to claim a discovery of the Higgs boson.

Rolf-Dieter Heuer, director general of CERN, said another year’s worth of data needs to be compiled before anyone can reach “a definitive answer on the Shakespearean question on the Higgs: To be or not to be?”

The hunt for the Higgs boson was one of the LHC’s major tasks when it started operating in 2008.

The collider, housed in an 18-mile tunnel buried deep underground near the French-Swiss border, smashes beams of protons together at close to the speed of light, recreating conditions that are thought to have existed a fraction of a second after the creation of the universe.

If the physicists’ theory is correct, a few Higgs bosons should be created in every trillion collisions, before rapidly decaying.

This decay would leave behind a ‘footprint’ that would show up as a bump in their graphs. Both the CMS and ATLAS are detectors used at the LHC for detecting these ‘footprints’.

The CMS is a 13,000-ton machine that sits 330 feet underground, while the ATLAS, at 148 feet long and 82 feet high, is the biggest detector ever constructed. Both experiments involve thousands of scientists from over a hundred institutes in 30 countries, including Australia, China, Japan, and Taiwan.

——

Source: University of Sydney; CERN.
Disclaimer: This article does not necessarily reflect the views of AsianScientist or its staff.