Mother of all colliders searching for the god of all particles


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SALT LAKE CITY -- The cat seemed to be out of the bag last week, but Tuesday physicists had confirmed what bloggers and science geeks, not to mention physicists, had been speculating for a week. Signs of the elusive and sought for Higgs boson, the so-called "God particle," have been seen in Geneva, and they were in a narrow and experimentally manageable mass range.

CERN scientists announced that through the combined effort of their two experiments, ATLAS and CMS, they had convincing but not colucive evidence that the Higgs was to be found somewhere in the range of 115 and 130 gigaelectron-volts, or a little over 100 times the mass of a proton.

This all sounds very technical, and the average person might say, "so what," but the reality of this announcement is that these scientists are on the verge of discovering what could be the most important piece of science in a very long time.

This shows one of the events seen at the ATLAS experiment. It shows two Z bosons decaying into two muons (the four red lines). One way for the Higgs boson to decay is into two Z bosons, which is what CERN scientists are so excited.
This shows one of the events seen at the ATLAS experiment. It shows two Z bosons decaying into two muons (the four red lines). One way for the Higgs boson to decay is into two Z bosons, which is what CERN scientists are so excited.

"I would like to rank the discovery of the Higgs particle comparable with the discovery of universal gravitation," said Dr. Yong-Shi Wu, a theoretical physicist at the University of Utah, referring to Newton's theory of gravity, outlined in 1686, a discovery that totally revolutionized astronomy.

Why is it so important? Because if it exists, then the Higgs mechanism is responsible, in part, for everything that it is possible for us to observe in the universe.

Mass is an incredibly important part of how a particle behaves. If every particle were massless like the photon, then every particle would be flying around the universe at the speed of light, unable to coalesce into what makes up the Sun, the Earth and life as we know it. The Higgs mechanism, and its associated particle, the Higgs boson, are thought to be the way that mass is given to particles.

"In the Standard Model (of particle physics), all elementary particles other than photons get masses from their interactions with the condensate formed by Higgs particles in the vacuum," said Dr. Wu.

"Let us view the Standard Model as a jigsaw puzzle. The Higgs particle is the big piece lying at the center of the puzzle, but it is missing. We have to find it and fit it in to complete the picture and know what the jigsaw puzzle means," he said.

In a certain sense, that is knowing what the very universe itself means.


CERN and the ATLAS ans CMS experiments have been looking for the simplest of a number of possible ways that the Higgs boson could manifest itself.

This isn't the first time that CERN has felt this incredibly important discovery was in the palm of their hand, waiting only to be grasped up. Late in 1999, CERN came tantalizingly close. Before the behemoth LHC was built, its predecessor, the Large Electron-Positron Collider, was reaching the end of its life. Given permission to push the much weaker machine as far as it could possibly go, CERN was able to catch glimpses of events in the range of 115 GeV at what they thought at the time was close to the 3-sigma level of confidence - a 99.9 percent confidence level.

They desperately asked for more time from CERN project supervisors, but extending the experimental time frame for LEP would have delayed work on the newer, more powerful LHC. Ultimately, the experiments were called off in favor of work on the LHC (and because CERN happened to be in debt at the time, as well). The results were later shown to be closer to the 2-sigma, closer to 95 percent confidence.

Still, these probabilities were not near what is required to make a formal discovery in particle physics, where the chances of a result being a fluke must be about one-in-a-million.

CERN and the ATLAS ans CMS experiments have been looking for the simplest of a number of possible ways that the Higgs boson could manifest itself.

The current generation of collider, the biggest ever built, was designed almost specifically to find this simplest kind of Higgs. It is, in a sense, the mother of all colliders searching for the god of all particles. If it turns out that these results fall through their fingers, and the Higgs is not found in the 115-130 GeV mass range, then there are a number of other possibilities as to what could be causing mass. That causes both problems and opportunities.

More complex versions of the Higgs mechanism would require energy levels at the very highest range that the LCH is capable of attaining in order to see. That could lead to a situation just like CERN found itself in back in 1999, desperately close to a discovery, but just barely unable to attain it. But proponents of alternative theories of the Higgs would not be quite so surprised.

Failure to get results confirming CERN's findings "would present a big challenge for particle theorists to find other possible mechanisms in place of the Higgs and its condensate. Some particle theorists who do not like the idea of a simple Higgs condensate would welcome this possibility," Dr. Wu said.

Email: [dnewlin@ksl.com](<mailto: dnewlin@ksl.com>)

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David Self Newlin

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