PHYSICISTS: WE'VE FOUND 'GOD PARTICLE'

PHYSICISTS FIND ‘GOD PARTICLE’







The search is all but over for a sub-atomic particle that is a
crucial building block of the universe. Physicists said on Thursday they
believe they have discovered the sub-atomic particle predicted nearly
half a century ago, which will go a long way toward explaining what
gives electrons and all matter in the universe size and shape. The
elusive particle, called a Higgs boson, was predicted in 1964 to help
fill in our understanding of the creation of the universe, which many
theorise occurred in a massive explosion known as the Big Bang.



The particle was named for Peter Higgs, one of the physicists who
proposed its existence, but it later became popularly known as the God
particle.

Last July, scientists at CERN, the Geneva-based European Organisation
for Nuclear Research, announced finding a particle they described as
Higgs-like, but they stopped short of saying conclusively that it was
the same particle or some version of it.

Scientists have now finished going through the entire set of data
year and announced the results in a statement and at a physics
conference in the Italian Alps. read more au.news.yahoo


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‘God Particle’: Six big consequences of the Higgs boson discovery – CSMonitor.com


March 14, 2013 by ohnwentsya | Leave a comment





‘God Particle’: Physicists announced Thursday that they have
confirmed the existence of the so-called God Particle a term disliked by
physicists and theologians alike. Here are six of the biggest
consequences of this discovery.

By Clara Moskowitz, LiveScience Senior Writer / March 14, 2013

• 
  

This track is an example of simulated data
modelled for the ATLAS detector on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at
CERN. The Higgs boson is produced in the collision of two protons at 14
TeV and quickly decays into four muons, a type of heavy electron that is
not absorbed by the detector. The tracks of the muons are shown in
yellow.

CERN/ATLAS

Physicists announced today (March 14) that a particle discovered at
the world’s largest atom smasher last year is a Higgs boson, a
long-sought particle thought to explain how other particles get their
mass.

Discovered at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), where protons zip at near light-speed around a 17-mile-long (27 kilometers) underground ring beneath Switzerland and France, the Higgs boson particle is the last undiscovered piece of the puzzle predicted by the Standard Model, the reigning theory of particle physics.

Confirming a Higgs boson, physicists say, will have wide-reaching implications. Here are six of the biggest consequences:

1. The origin of mass


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
thinking goes.

“The Higgs mechanism is the thing that allows us to understand how
the particles acquire mass,” said Joao Guimaraes da Costa, a physicist
at Harvard University
who is the Standard Model Convener at the LHC’s ATLAS experiment, last
year when the discovery was announced. “If there was no such mechanism,
then everything would be massless.”

Confirming the particle is a Higgs would also confirm that the Higgs
mechanism for particles to acquire mass is correct. “This discovery
bears on the knowledge of how mass comes about at the quantum level, and
is the reason we built the LHC. It is an unparalleled achievement,” Caltech professor of physics Maria Spiropulu, co-leader of the CMS experiment, said in a statement last year. [Gallery: Search for the Higgs Boson]

And, it may offer clues to the next mystery down the line, which is
why individual particles have the masses that they do. “That could be
part of a much larger theory,” said Harvard University particle
physicist Lisa Randall. “Knowing what the Higgs boson is, is the first step of knowing a little more about what that theory could be. It’s connected.”

2. 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 has been discovered except one: the Higgs boson.

“It’s the missing piece in the Standard Model,” Jonas Strandberg, a
researcher at CERN working on the ATLAS experiment, said last year of
the particle announcement. “So it would definitely be a confirmation
that the theories we have now are right.”

So far, the Higgs boson seems to match up with predictions made by
the Standard Model. Even so, the Standard Model itself isn’t thought to
be complete. It doesn’t encompass gravity, for example, and leaves out
the dark matter thought to make up 98 percent of all matter in the
universe. [6 Weird Facts About Gravity]

“Clear evidence that the new particle is the Standard Model Higgs
boson still would not complete our understanding of the universe,” Patty
McBride, head of the CMS Center at Fermilab,
said today (March 14) in a statement. “We still wouldn’t understand why
gravity is so weak and we would have the mysteries of dark matter to
confront. But it is satisfying to come a step closer to validating a
48-year-old theory.”

3. The electroweak force


The confirmation of the Higgs also helps to explain how two of the
fundamental forces of the universe the electromagnetic force that
governs interactions between charged particles, and the weak force
that’s responsible for radioactive decay can be unified. [9 Unsolved Physics Mysteries]

Every force in nature is associated with a particle. The particle
tied to electromagnetism is the photon, a tiny, massless particle. The
weak force is associated with particles called the W and Z bosons, which
are very massive.

The Higgs mechanism is thought to be responsible for this.

“If you introduce the Higgs field, the W and Z bosons mix with the
field, and through this mixing they acquire mass,” Strandberg said.
“This explains why the W and Z bosons have mass, and also unifies the
electromagnetic and weak forces into the electroweak force.”

Though other evidence has helped buffer the union of these two forces, the Higgs discovery may seal the deal.

4. Supersymmetry


The theory supersymmetry
is also affected by the Higgs discovery. This idea posits that every
known particle has a “superpartner” particle with slightly different
characteristics.

Supersymmetry is attractive because it could help unify some of the
other forces of nature, and even offers a candidate for the particle
that makes up dark matter.
So far, though, scientists have found indications of only a Standard
Model Higgs boson, without any strong hints of supersymmetric particles.

5. Validation of LHC


The Large Hadron Collider is the world’s largest particle accelerator. It was built for around $10 billion by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)
to probe higher energies than had ever been reached on Earth. Finding
the Higgs boson was touted as one of the machine’s biggest goals.

The newly announced finding offers major validation for the LHC and
for the scientists who’ve worked on the search for many years.

“This discovery bears on the knowledge of how mass comes about at the
quantum level, and is the reason we built the LHC. It is an
unparalleled achievement,” Spiropulu said in a statement last year.
“More than a generation of scientists has been waiting for this very
moment and particle physicists, engineers, and technicians in
universities and laboratories around the globe have been working for
many decades to arrive at this crucial fork. This is the pivotal moment
for us to pause and reflect on the gravity of the discovery, as well as a
moment of tremendous intensity to continue the data collection and
analyses.”

The discovery of the Higgs also has major implications for scientist Peter Higgs
and his colleagues who first proposed the Higgs mechanism in 1964. The
finding also shines a symbolic light on the boson’s namesake, the late
Indian physicist and mathematician Satyendranath Bose, who along with Albert Einstein, helped to define bosons. A class of elementary particles,
bosons (which include gluons and gravitons) mediate interactions
between fermions (including quarks, electrons and neutrinos), the other
group of fundamental building blocks of the universe.

6. Is the universe doomed?


The Higgs boson discovery opens the door to new calculations that
weren’t previously possible, scientists say, including one that suggests
the universe is in for a cataclysm billions of years from now.

The mass of the Higgs boson is a critical part of a calculation that portends the future of space and time.
At around 126 times the mass of the proton, the Higgs is just about
what would be needed to create a fundamentally unstable universe that
would lead to a cataclysm billions of years from now.

“This calculation tells you that many tens of billions of years from
now there’ll be a catastrophe,” Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist
at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., said last month at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

“It may be the universe we live in is inherently unstable, and at
some point billions of years from now it’s all going to get wiped out,”
added Lykken, a collaborator on the CMS experiment.

Follow Clara Moskowitz on Twitter @ClaraMoskowitz. Follow LiveScience on Twitter @livescience, Facebook orGoogle+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

Read the article on CSMonitor at the link- http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2013/0314/God-Particle-Six-big-consequences-of-the-Higgs-boson-discovery?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Daily&utm_campaign=20130314_Newsletter%3AScience_Sailthru&cmpid=ema%3Anws%3AScience%2520Weekly%2520%2803%2F14%2F2013%29






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