This could help find missing particles that move our universe away from the apparent knife-edge between being stable and rapidly undergoing a phase transition. The fact that the universe nevertheless seems stable suggests something might be missing in the calculations - something we have not discovered yet.Īfter a three-year hiatus for maintenance and upgrades, collisions at the LHC are resuming at an unprecedented energy, nearly double that used to detect the Higgs boson. Instead, similar to ice at the melting point, the universe could suddenly undergo a rapid “phase transition.” But rather than going from a solid to a liquid, like ice transitioning to water, this would involve crucially changing the masses - and the laws of nature in the universe. As it stands, the results indicate that our universe isn’t in a perfectly stable state (opens in new tab). Its properties not only determine the masses of elementary particles, but also how stable they are. Experiments at CERN have continued to probe the Higgs boson.
Yet the discovery has raised new, fundamental questions. Elementary particles would be massless, there would be no atoms, no humans, no solar systems and no structure in the universe. Without the Higgs boson, the whole theoretical framework describing particle physics at its smallest scales breaks apart. In the following year, Higgs and his collaborator François Englert won the Nobel prize (opens in new tab) “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles.” Finally, on July 4, 2012, two independent experiments at CERN had each collected enough data to declare the discovery of the Higgs boson. In 2010, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) began colliding protons with seven times more energy than the Tevatron. In 2011, the Tevatron ceased operations - the Higgs boson escaped detection again. But proton-antiproton collisions produce a lot of debris, making it much harder to extract the signal from the data. The Tevatron collided protons (which, along with neutrons, make up the atomic nucleus) and antiprotons (nearly identical to protons but with opposite charge) with an energy five times higher than what was achieved in Geneva - surely, enough to make the Higgs. Meanwhile, the most ambitious American collider in history, the Tevatron (opens in new tab), had started taking data at Fermilab, close to Chicago. It ran for 11 years, but its maximum energy turned out to be just 5% too low to produce the Higgs boson.
The idea was to smash particles together with such high energy that a Higgs particle could be created in a 17-mile-long (27 kilometers) tunnel at The European Organization for Nuclear Research (known by its French acronym CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland - the largest electron-positron (a positron is almost identical to an electron but has opposite charge) collider ever built. It took until 1989 for the first experiment with a serious chance of discovering the Higgs boson to begin its search. “We apologize to experimentalists for having no idea what is the mass of the Higgs boson … and for not being sure of its couplings to other particles … For these reasons, we do not want to encourage big experimental searches for the Higgs boson.” When three theoretical physicists calculated the properties of a Higgs boson, they concluded with an apology (opens in new tab). And according to the same model, such a field should also give rise to a Higgs particle - meaning if the Higgs boson wasn’t there, this would ultimately falsify the entire theory.īut it soon became clear that discovering this particle would be challenging. This theory suggests particle masses are a consequence of elementary particles interacting with a field, dubbed the Higgs field.
Higgs boson particle series#
Physicist Peter Higgs (opens in new tab) predicted the Higgs boson in a series of papers between 19, as an inevitable consequence of the mechanism responsible for giving elementary particles mass.
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