The mile loop of super-powered electromagnets can accelerate charged particles to significant fractions of the speed of light, causing collisions violent enough to break these particles into fundamental constituents, and deform space around the impact point.
With a high enough collision energy, it was calculated that scientists could basically super-charge the Higgs boson, pushing it up into an energy state where it would decay in ways that we can observe. These energies were so great that some even panicked and said the LHC would destroy the world, while others went so far as to describe an observation of the Higgs as a peek into an alternate dimension.
As you can see from this chart of the composition of the universe, understanding dark matter and dark energy will be fundamental to understanding our universe.
Initial observations seemed to actually falsify predictions, and no sign of the Higgs could be found — leading some researchers who had campaigned for the spending of billions of dollars to go on television and meekly make the true-but-unsatisfying argument that falsifying a scientific theory is just as important as confirming it. With a bit more time, however, the measurements began to add up, and on March 14, CERN officially announced the confirmation of the Higgs boson.
There is even some evidence to suggest the existence of multiple Higgs bosons, but that idea needs significant further study. Well, the LHC just recently reopened with significant upgrades , and has an eye to look into everything from antimatter to dark energy.
Dark matter is thought to interact with regular matter solely through the medium of gravity — and by creating mass, the Higgs boson could be crucial to understanding exactly how. In any case, the Higgs is really only confirmed to exist; it is not yet remotely understood. Will future experiments confirm super-symmetry, and the idea that the Higgs boson could decay into dark matter itself?
Check out our ExtremeTech Explains series for more in-depth coverage. The scientists therefore needed to build up enough evidence to suggest that particles that could have appeared from a Higgs production and transformation were indeed the result of such a process.
Sharma and his colleagues presented a plan to CMS in September of how to tackle the problem with half that data. Early signs of the Higgs boson were there: both detectors had seen bumps in their data that were starting to look distinct from any statistical fluctuations or noise. But the results lacked the necessary statistical certainty to claim discovery. The collaborations had performed better than expected to discover the Higgs boson with just two years of data from the LHC.
Gonzalez Suarez celebrated with mixed emotions. The road from data to discovery was challenging. But what have we learnt about the Higgs boson since then? Find out more in part two of the Higgs saga coming soon. The Higgs boson: What makes it special? Image: CERN. As a layman I would now say… I think we have it. Elegance and symmetries At the subatomic scale, the universe is a complex choreography of elementary particles interacting with one another through fundamental forces, which can be explained using a term that physicists of all persuasions turn to: elegance.
The Standard Model of particle physics represented in a single equation Image: CERN The Standard Model is based on the notion of symmetries in nature, that the physical properties they describe remain unchanged under some transformation, such as a rotation in space. Something in nothing The Higgs field is peculiar in two particular ways. Bump-hunting at the Large Hadron Collider Particle collisions at sufficiently high energies are necessary to produce a Higgs boson, but for a long time physicists were hunting in the dark: they did not know what this energy range was.
Entering Uncharted Waters. Higgs modified slightly his paper and submitted it to a different journal Physical Review Letters who published it along with the papers from the other two groups. For the sake of simplicity we will continue to refer to the boson, mechanism and field associated with the theory as the Higgs boson, the Higgs mechanism and the Higgs field.
You might ask how his theory works, which is a good question, the best way to get an answer to that question is to take a university course in particle physics, but for those of you looking for a quick fix your best bet is an analogy. Higgs proposed a field, now called the Higgs field, which endows particles with a mass via what became known as the Higgs mechanism.
The basic idea of a field is that at every point in space there is a number which tells you something about that point. So if you drew a grid for every point in the universe that would be a field. When you have a field you have associated bosons: the photon for the electromagnetic field, the W and Z bosons for the weak field, gluons for the strong field and the Higgs boson for the Higgs field.
So the discovery of the Higgs boson infers the existence of the Higgs field which therefore infers that it is indeed the Higgs mechanism that endows particles with mass.
So these are the key players in the theory now for the analogies of how they work remember they are only analogies. These analogies were proposed by David Miller and are probably the most famous analogies but have been slightly modified in light of the discovery of the Higgs Boson. On the day of the announcement of the discovery of the Higgs boson the rumour got out that a big announcement was set to be made and the venue where the announcement was set to be made was packed full of physicists, including Professor Higgs.
So imagine the scene the physicists are evenly distributed across the hall. After the announcement of the discovery imagine as the physicists near Professor Higgs clamber to congratulate him and shake his hand.
As Professor Higgs makes his way across the hall to leave, the physicists he comes close to move in to congratulate him and the ones he leaves behind return to their even distribution.
The well-wishers clustered around Professor Higgs making it hard for him to move through the hall.
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