By Matthew Chancey | December 04, 2012 3:00 pm

The Higgs Boson, a key piece in the puzzle that is the big bang theory, was finally found after fifty years of searching. The standard model, or the theory of almost everything, is an explanation of how most of the smallest particles in the universe act with respect to the strong force, weak force, and electro-magnetic field. The Higgs was measured to have a mass of about 133 times that of a proton, or the positively charged sub-atomic particle in an atom’s nucleus. A second confirmation that the Higgs particle might be the key to the standard model.

Scientists discovered the particle using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. This collider is the largest and most powerful in the world; it stretches twenty-seven kilometers and is 100 meters below the surface. It is 38,000 tons and coast approximately ten billion dollars to build. The collider uses 9300 superconducting magnets, magnets that are cooled to near absolute zero in order to produce extreme magnetic fields, which in turn guide the proton beams (have a positive charge). The beams go around the track and are in essence pushed by four superconducting radio frequency cavities, which create a charged field that boosts the speed of our positively charged particles as they pass. This process is repeated until they reach the maximum energy, a speed close to that of light (300,000,000 m/s)! Scientists at CERN ultimately used six different detectors to image the data, and a global network of computers, more than 40,000, to process all the data collected.

It took such a long time to find this particle because it does not always exist in a state that can be easily observed. The easiest way to think about it is that it just stops existing in the same level of space/time that we do. It was approximated that it would take close to 1 trillion runs to actually find the Higgs particle because of how little time it spends in an observable state.

The particle was proposed to have existed in 1964 by physicist Peter Higgs and colleagues. The Higgs Boson was proposed because a group of scientists were trying to figure out what happened after the Big Bang. In the calculations conducted, the scientists kept finding zero mass particles popping in and out of existence, and this is when they realized that some sort of field had to be causing this. Thus, the birth of the Higgs Boson and the Higgs field occurred. This field is what gives all particles mass and determines how much mass they have. This happens when the particle interacts with the energy field by moving through it and as it does so, the field slows it down by reducing the particle’s inertia. Not only does this discovery help confirm the standard model it also opens doors to different understandings of how matter works that could, in turn, help to answer some of the biggest unanswered questions in the universe.

The Large Hadron Collider will continue to look for other Higgs Boson particles and so will the other colliders around the world, because more proof needs to be found of this particles existence and its suppersymetric partners.

 

 

References:

“Higgs Found | Physics | Science News.” Higgs Found | Physics | Science News. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Nov. 2012. <http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/341993/title/Higgs_found?gclid=CI_n7ZWp3rMCFQyDnQodtVUA1w>.

Categorized under: Physics, Astro-physics, Quantum-physics

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