Higgs Boson, The God Particle, discovered by CERN LHC

Higgs Boson Particle, famous as God Particle, is finally found at CERN Lab as a landmark discovery in the field of Physics in last 10 years.

CERN has announced the discovery of a new subatomic Boson Particle that has all the appearances of the famous Higgs boson, proposed in the early 1960s and whose experimental hunt started about thirty years ago.

The research took 9 billion Euros and 7000 scientist for the construction and operation of the Lab that allowed Higgs Boson discovery. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator Lab, shaped as a is ring of several kilometers.

In the experiment, Protons are smashed against each other at speeds close to that of light to recreate the extreme conditions necessary for the appearance of some of the hidden subatomic particles, like at the time of creation of universe. The test was performed separately by two teams of scientist named ATLAS and CMS, in order to ensure the accuracy and match the findings.



Sandrine Laplace, who worked on behalf of CNRS in Atlas, explains the experimental prowess with an analogy.

If we could store all the music of data from the LHC for a year, we would have to 600 million years to listen. Materially, we could save that forty years of music by carefully selecting the pieces that we felt were most relevant. This is already a virtual stack of CDs 20 km. In this mass, the appearances of the Higgs boson are only a few scattered notes embedded in background noise. A few minutes of music at best.

Given the complexity of the task, we thought it would take several years of rehearsal with the orchestra, the LHC, and sound engineers, detectors, to make recordings and rework. It has not happened. The announcement of the discovery comes as a few years earlier than expected. The theorist Peter Higgs, who attended the conference at CERN, was also honored.

The Standard Model

The Standard Model is the reigning theory of particle physics that describes the universe's very small constituents. Every particle predicted by the Standard Model had been discovered except the Higgs boson. It was the missing piece in the Standard Model, so it would definitely be a confirmation that the theories we have now are right.

What is Higgs Boson Particle

Higgs Boson Particle or the God Particle, that giving mass to everything, from the times of Big Bang, was proposed in the early 1960s by British Professor Peter Higgs and Belgian Scientist Francois Englert and Robert Brout.

Joao Guimaraes Da Costa, a physicist at Harvard University who also participated as the Standard Model Convener in the experiment at LHC in ATLAS team explains Higgs Boson as:

The Higgs boson has long been thought the key to resolving the mystery of the origin of mass. The Higgs boson is associated with a field, called the Higgs field, theorized to pervade the universe. As other particles travel though this field, they acquire mass much as swimmers moving through a pool get wet. The Higgs mechanism is the thing that allows us to understand how the particles acquire mass. If there was no such mechanism, then everything would be massless.

Higgs Boson between 125 and 126 GeV Mass

The boson would weigh about 130 times the mass of a hydrogen atom. This represents, in terms of energy, the unit commonly used in particle physics, between 125 and 126 GeV. The probability that the observations are only background noise nuisance is only one chance in ten million for each experiment: what is the minimum required in particle physics to declare a new discovery.

Records from both ATLAS and CMS experiments were conducted independently with very different detection tools. As the Higgs boson disappears very quickly, the researchers could not uncover it through that particles from its decay.