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What Do We Learn from the “God Particle”?

Many Americans will be celebrating the country’s birthday today, but physicists and science geeks will also be celebrating the 10th anniversary of the discovery of the Higgs Boson—also known as the “God particle”—on July 4.

You may not be familiar with physicist Peter Higgs, who first predicted the existence of new particles in the 1960s and hypothesized that we are surrounded by a sea of ​​quantum information known as the Higgs field, but his Nobel Prize-winning discovery made things better. possible. In our world it is possible.

The existence of the Higgs boson is one of the reasons why everything we see, including ourselves, all the planets and stars, has mass and exists – which is why it is called the “God particle.”

Particles postulated by Higgs and his physicists in 1964 can only gain mass by interacting with a field that permeates the entire universe known as the Higgs field. That is, if the field did not exist, the particles would float freely and move at the speed of light.

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The discovery of the Higgs Boson in July 2012 laid the foundation for the existence of all elementary particles in our universe. The image above is a visualization of an event recorded in the CMS detector at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. Shows the expected properties of the SM Higgs Boson decay into a pair of photons

Unlike many other important inventions, the Higgs Boson cannot be found in the traditional sense – it has to be invented. Once created, evidence of its decay is sought in data collected at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

In the world’s largest particle accelerator — where protons are smashed together at near the speed of light in a vast, 27-kilometre, 300-foot-long race track tunnel beneath the French-Swiss border — scientists know they’ve found the evidence. decay in 2012.

Many technologies – in healthcare, industry, and computing – have been developed in the decades since the Higgs Boson was first observed.

Since its discovery was announced on July 4, 2012, physicists have been analyzing how the Higgs Boson interacts with other particles to see if it conforms to what is known as the Standard Model of physics.

The existence of the Higgs Boson, a subatomic particle that represents the Higgs field-carrying particle, was first proposed by British physicist Peter Higgs in 1964. The image above is of the Higgs, who received the Nobel Prize in Physics for proposing the existence of the Higgs boson, at CERN in July 2012

Supermassive bosons are an important part of the Standard Model of particle physics

The Higgs boson is an elementary particle – one of the basic building blocks of the universe according to the Standard Model of particle physics.

It was named after physicist Peter Higgs as part of the mechanism that explains why particles have mass.

According to the Standard Model, our universe is made up of 12 particles of matter – including six quarks and six leptons.

It also has four forces – gravity, electromagnetism, strong force and weak force.

Each force has a corresponding carrier particle known as a boson that acts on the material.

The theory goes that the Higgs boson is responsible for mass transfer.

It was first proposed in 1964 and was not discovered until 2012 – during the operation of the Large Hadron Collider.

The discovery was significant as if it had been proven non-existent, it meant tearing up the Standard Model and returning to the drawing board.


The Standard Model is a heuristic theory that explains three of the four main forces of the universe – electromagnetism, the weak force, and the strong force – but excludes gravity.

There are other aspects of our universe, such as dark matter and dark energy, that the Standard Model has not yet explained.

Scientists have studied how the Higgs Boson interacts with other particles and the so-called “coupling” can produce – this is achieved by conducting a lot of experiments and analyzing a lot of data.

In 2018, scientists determined that 58% of the Higgs boson decays into b quarks, also known as beauty or bottom quarks.

Although CERN has been at the center of the action when it comes to the Higgs Boson, not many people realize that at one point the United States will become home to what will become the world’s largest particle accelerator – the so-called Tevatron.

Planned in the 1980s for a site deep below Waxahachie, Texas, the particle accelerator will be 87 kilometers long with the ability to slam protons together at higher energy levels than is currently possible at CERN.

However, a combination of bureaucratic anxiety with project costs and nervousness among scholars and religious people alike over the phrase ‘the God particle’ led to the project’s cancellation in 1993.

CERN, founded on September 29, 1954, is the focal point of a community of 10,000 scientists from around the world and is also the birthplace of the World Wide Web. It has 23 member states, but the United States only has observer status at CERN – meaning it is not part of the CERN board that makes important decisions about its science.

In 2012, Higgs and his collaborator Francois Englert won the award Nobel Prize For “the theoretical discovery of the mechanisms that contributed to our understanding of the origin of the mass of subatomic particles.”

There are many questions that scientists still want to answer in the years and decades to come at CERN.

What can the Higgs boson tell us about the early days of our universe?

Could dark matter and dark matter, which make up 68 and 27 percent of the universe, respectively, be recovered from interactions with the Higgs boson?

Is it possible to open a microscopic black hole and could energy be drawn through it one day?

Can we reveal more information about the b or beauty quark and what it means for the singularity?

What can we learn about M theory, which states that instead of just the three dimensions of space and time, there may actually be at least 11 dimensions that are not composed of particles that we know of but chains of tiny vibrations that all interact with one another.

Run 3 launch for the Large Hadron Collider to be broadcast He live On all CERN social media channels starting at 4pm on Tuesday, July 5.

It is best to think of the Higgs field as an energy or information field that permeates everything around us. The image above is a technical view of this field issued by CERN

Physicist Peter Higgs first hypothesized the existence of the Higgs field and the Higgs boson in 1964. The image above is a scientific paper in which he demonstrated this state

CERN is one of the largest scientific institutions in the world, and is home to more than 2,000 scientists working on many physics projects. The image above is a series of LHC dipole magnets in the tunnel at the end of the second long stop, when the facility at CERN was upgraded for several years so that protons could be fused at a much higher energy range when July 3 started

Future experiments at CERN will try to unravel mysteries such as dark matter and dark energy. Pictured above, a series of magnetic dipoles inside a tunnel at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider


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