#higgs boson
Have we found it yet? Yes, yes– Wait, nope, it’s gone again, wait, there it is again! Yes, I’m talking about the Higgs boson, also known as “the god particle”.
Lately there has been a lot of discussion about having found this particle but we have not actually been able to prove it’s existence. What is the Higgs boson? What is all the fuss about? How do we know if we have found it or not?
The Higgs boson is a theoretical elementary particle that fits into the Standard Model of particle physics, or according to some.. misunderstanding beings, a particle that proves the existence of their god(s). To understand what the Higgs boson “is”, we have to go right back to the very beginning, the Big Bang.
Particles began to form just after the theoretical implosion made time, space and energy out of nothing. The Universe supposedly consists of two different groups of elementary particles, these two groups being (according to the Standard Model of Particle Physics) the fundamental fermions and the fundamental bosons.
Fermions: Quarks, leptons and their antiparticles.
Bosons: Gauge bosons and the Higgs boson.
The popular theory on how the Universe came to be tells us that quarks, anti-quarks and photons came first, then bosons, which were followed by the Higgs boson and etc.
So why is the Higgs boson so important, if we do not think it came first?
Well, finding the Higgs boson probably won’t tell us that much about how the Universe came to be, as so much came before it and after it. However, it could fill a huge gap in the Standard Model that’s been there for quite a while.
What gap?
The Standard Model of particle physics doesn’t explain how some particles gain their mass and therefor, in 1964 the Higgs mechanism was suggested by Peter Higgs and six other physicists.
The Higgs mechanism is theorized process that gives mass to elementary particles, the particles supposedly gain mass by interacting with the Higgs field, which is believed to permeate the Universe. So what we’re hoping to get out of the Higgs Boson, is how these certain particles gain mass and this sort of information would help us understand our Universe better, or at least, before something else that is completely baffling comes along!
How could we ever find such a thing?
You have most likely heard about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN (in Geneva, Switzerland), one of the main goals of the LHC is to test the existence of the Higgs boson and examine it.
The LHC works by smashing together two beams of protons at close to light-speed, which results in a vast shower of particles that are only created at high energies. Physicists look for the Higgs in the vast shower of particles.
Haven’t they found it?
On July the 4th, typically enough, physicists decided to announce that they had possible evidence of the Higgs boson and if not the Higgs boson then they are “more than 99%” sure that they’ve found a new elementary particle. It was supposedly weighing roughly 125 times the mass of the proton.
“This is indeed a new particle. We know it must be a boson and it’s the heaviest boson ever found,” Joe Incandela, spokesperson for LHC’s CMS experiment, said in a statement. “The implications are very significant and it is precisely for this reason that we must be extremely diligent in all of our studies and cross-checks.”
You can read more about this here: http://www.space.com/16428-higgs-boson-particle-lhc-findings.html
So let’s just hope it’s not another false alarm because their budget is cutting tight!
Sources:
http://cosmosscience.tumblr.com/post/6696460454/the-big-bang-theory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson
fromThe God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question? (1993) by Leon Lederman
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GUESS WHO GOT PETER HIGGS’S FIRST PHOTO AFTER BEING ANNOUNCED AS THE 2013 PHYSICS NOBEL PRIZE WINNER :D :D
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