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
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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
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