'God Particle': The Higgs Boson One Year Later

PHOTO: proton collision




The boson itself is more like evidence that the Higgs field exists. Lincoln says to think of the Higgs field and boson as water and waves. "Because you see the waves themselves, you know there's water," he said. "If we didn't see waves, we'd always wonder if there was actually water or not." Since physicists have seen a particle that looks a whole lot like the Higgs boson, they're pretty sure that the Higgs field exists.

Higgs's original theory made very specific predictions about the boson's properties (like its electric charge and its quantum spin) as well as how it would interact with its environment (such as what types of particles it would decay into). Since last July, physicists have had their hands full, analyzing a newer and bigger set of data from CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's most powerful particle accelerator. It was the LHC that first provided researchers with evidence of the Higgs boson's existence, and the new data fits in line with Higgs's theory and provides even more evidence that CERN has truly found the Higgs boson.


The existence of the Higgs boson fills in an important blank for the Standard Model, a theory that explains the behavior of particles. Without proving its existence, mass could not be explained. "For a theory that describes matter, that's a pretty big deficiency," said Tipton.

CERN is looking to do more with the Higgs boson than simply confirm its existence. Lincoln says that there's a very large discrepancy that still needs to be addressed. The Higgs-boson-like particle observed at the LHC a year ago has about 100 trillion times less than energy than what the Standard Model predicts.

Unfortunately, he will have to wait awhile until he sees that issue resolved. The LHC is currently turned off for maintenance issues and is not scheduled to be turned back on until late 2014 at the earliest. However, when it comes back online, he hopes that they'll start tackling that question quickly. "It's like the screaming gorilla in the room," he said.

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