After decades of careful experiment, physicists say they have found the
"strongest indication to date" to prove the existence of the Higgs boson
-- a subatomic particle so important to the understanding of space,
time and matter that the physicist Leon Lederman nicknamed it "the God particle."
The announcement today, based on experiments at the Department of
Energy's Fermilab near Chicago and other institutions, is not the final
word, but it's very close. And it comes just before a major meeting
this week in Australia, where more findings will be announced from the
giant underground particle accelerator at CERN, the great physics lab in
the Alps on the French-Swiss border.
"This is one of the cornerstones of how we understand the universe,"
said Rob Roser, a Fermilab physicist, "and if it's not there, we have to
go back and check our assumptions about how the universe exists."
Roser said he expected the CERN scientists to offer more evidence of the
Higgs particle, though they will also be cautious. "The Higgs particle,
if it's real, will show itself in different ways. We need for all of
them to be consistent before we can say for sure we've seen it."
Fermilab has been home to an atom smasher called the Tevatron, which was
shut down last year because CERN's Large Hadron Collider is more
powerful. Scientists who used the Tevatron have been sifting through
the masses of data they collected by sending subatomic particles
crashing into each other at nearly the speed of light.
"During its life, the Tevatron must have produced thousands of Higgs
particles, if they actually exist, and it's up to us to try to find them
in the data we have collected," said Luciano Ristori, a physicist at
Fermilab and the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics, in a
statement. "We have developed sophisticated simulation and analysis
programs to identify Higgs-like patterns. Still, it is easier to look
for a friend's face in a sports stadium filled with 100,000 people than
to search for a Higgs-like event among trillions of collisions."
The particle was first proposed in the 1960s by the English physicist
Peter Higgs. The international effort to find it has taken decades,
using tremendous amounts of energy to crash subatomic particles into
each other in giant underground tracks, where they are steered by
magnetic fields. Several different experiments have been done by
independent teams to ensure accuracy.
Wednesday's report from scientists using CERN's Large Hadron Collider
may sound similar to today's from Fermilab, but physicists will listen
closely to the details.
"The LHC results that will be announced on July 4 will have much greater
statistical significance and hence give us a much more detailed picture
of what is really going on," said Mark Wise, a professor of high energy
physics at the California Institute of Technology. "So in layman's
terms: a hint from Fermilab and something more definitive to come on
July 4."
Finding the Higgs particle would not be of practical value, at least not
yet, but Roser argued that when the electron was first discovered in
1897, nobody guessed how it would lead to the high-tech, wired world we
have today.
Physicists say the Higgs boson would help explain how we, and the rest
of the universe, exist. It would explain why the matter created in the
Big Bang has mass, and is able to coalesce. Without it, as CERN
explained in a background paper, "the universe would be a very different
place…. no ordinary matter as we know it, no chemistry, no biology, and
no people."
What is the God particle?
The "God particle" is the nickname of a subatomic particle called the
Higgs boson. In layman’s terms, different subatomic particles are
responsible for giving matter different properties. One of the most
mysterious and important properties is mass. Some particles, like
protons and neutrons, have mass. Others, like photons, do not. The Higgs
boson, or “God particle,” is believed to be the particle which gives
mass to matter. The “God particle” nickname grew out of the long,
drawn-out struggles of physicists to find this elusive piece of the
cosmic puzzle. What follows is a very brief, very simplified explanation
of how the Higgs boson fits into modern physics, and how science is
attempting to study it.
The “standard model” of particle physics is a system that attempts to
describe the forces, components, and reactions of the basic particles
that make up matter. It not only deals with atoms and their components,
but the pieces that compose some subatomic particles. This model does
have some major gaps, including gravity, and some experimental
contradictions. The standard model is still a very good method of
understanding particle physics, and it continues to improve. The model
predicts that there are certain elementary particles even smaller than
protons and neutrons. As of the date of this writing, the only particle
predicted by the model which has not been experimentally verified is the
“Higgs boson,” jokingly referred to as the “God particle.”
