The existence of the Higgs particle now confirmed

The discovery of the existence of the elusive elementary particle, the Higgs boson, also popularly known as “God particle,” has been confirmed. The particle has been the missing link in the conceptual Standard Model of particle physics.

The discovery was announced on July 4, 2012 to a group of physicists attending the International Conference of High Energy Physics in Melbourne, Australia. It was greeted by an outburst of applause and a long standing ovation. The announcement was based on confirmed findings unveiled in the European Center for Nuclear Research or CERN, which is based at the Geneva-French border. CERN operates the world’s most powerful accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The particle was originally named for physicist Peter Higgs of Edinburgh, who in 1964 first postulated the existence of a single particle responsible for imparting mass to other subatomic particles, the quarks and gluons, and consequently to atoms, molecules and all tangible matters in the universe.

Physicist Higgs was in attendance at the Melbourne meeting and was overwhelmed by the fact that the discovery happened within his lifetime. It should be a sure nomination for a Nobel Prize in physics for Higgs and his collaborators.

The Higgs hunt has been going on for decades in a number of nuclear centers around the world. The facilities are called atom smashers or colliders. They are massive facilities and very complicated in design. I once had the opportunity to visit and tour one such facility — DESY in Hamburg, Germany, and I was awestruck by its scientific magnificence.

Atom smashers or colliders make use of beams of atom fragments like proton, electron or positron. The beams are spun around in opposite directions until they reach peak velocity and finally allowed to collide head-on.  The collision creates a burst of energy which, in turn, condenses into new particles. The particles are short-lived — only within a few trillionths of a second — and this is one reason why they are extremely difficult to detect.

The more famous accelerators that have been actively involved in the hunt for new particles are the Stanford Linear Accelerator center in Palo Alto, California, employing electron-proton collision; the Superconducting Supercollider near Waxahachie, Texas; Germany’s DESY or Electron Synchrotron; the Bevatron Accelerator at Lawrence, Berkeley National Laboratory; and the Tevatron accelerator at Fermi National Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, using proton-antiproton collision. But such facilities were found to be not powerful enough to create the Higgs particle.

The large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN finally joined the hunt. It was organized and funded by 26 European members and outside contributors like Japan and the US. The LHC was built at a staggering cost of $8 billion and became operational in 2008. It has a ramped-up energy output at 1.18 trillion electric volts or TeV, about 20 percent higher than that of Fermi Lab in Illinois. Thus, the proton streams are energized to travel at almost the speed of light before they are put on collision course. There were misapprehensions among doomsayers, saying that at this energy level, the power of collisions may create a micro “black hole” and put the entire city of Geneva at great risk.

The LHC is unprecedented in scale and complexity in design. Located near Geneva, it is 90 meters underground in a tunnel measuring about 27 km in circumference and eight kilometers across. It uses 9,300 superconducting magnets, cooled by liquid helium, to accelerate two streams of protons moving in opposite direction, whirling 11,000 times a second around the tunnel. At every couple of kilometers of the tunnel, a huge particle detector is in place. Some 5,000 scientists and engineers have been involved in the project.

The CERN discovery of the Higgs boson has put the Standard Model of particle physics on a firm scientific foundation which provides an elegant explanation why all matters in the universe have mass. The model theorizes that the Higgs boson pervades all of cosmic space. It also explains how the four fundamental forces of nature — electromagnetism, the “weak” nuclear force, the “strong” nuclear force, and gravitation interact and govern the overall dynamics of the universe.

The CERN-LHC’s success has stoked worldwide interest among physicists to explore other uncharted domains and find some answers to baffling cosmological mysteries such as the existence of dark energy, the invisible dark matter, the nature of gravitation itself, etc. The LHC hardware can still be further upgraded to operate between 3.5 to 7 TeV and increase its capability to discover all sorts of new particles.

Existence of dark energy

In 2011, three cosmologists were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their astounding discovery that the expansion of the Universe is “accelerating.” The discovery was based on measurements of light emitted by some 50 distant supernovae (star) explosions. It is theorized that the acceleration is caused by dark energy, which counters gravitational attraction and instead pulls the universe apart. The existence of dark energy in the universe, therefore, poses an enigmatic question.

Invisible dark matter

Galaxies are huge clumps of all kinds of matter and they rotate fast enough around their center. By the momentum of their movement, galaxies should fly apart but the fact that they don’t only tells us that some unseen form of matter is propelling and holding them together. And since its role is massively strong, dark matter should exist predominatingly in space over visible matter. The puzzling question is — why is dark matter invisible and what kind of particles is the stuff made of?

Other enigmatic puzzles

One lingering question that has baffled physicists is — why the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics at the subatomic level are mutually incompatible. Physicists are looking for answers and they theorize that some other fundamental particles may be involved to help explain in a unified way all the basic interactions of the four fundamental forces in the universe. Or take the case of gravity itself.  Is gravitational attraction also carried by a particle, say, a “gravitron”?

With the LHC, God may let us in on more of His many little secrets.

* * *

Dr. Ricardo M. Lantican is a National Scientist (National Academy of Science and Technology) and professor emeritus at UP Los Baños. E-mail him at: [email protected].