It looks like the elusive Higgs-Boson particle has been found! The long sought after sub-atomic particle, long postulated, has been extremely difficult to confirm by experiments. Now experimenters using the Large Hadron collider in Geneva, Switzland seem to have finally observed the decay products of the Higgs-Boson particle. "If the Higgs has been finally identified, this will be the biggest discovery in particle physics for forty years," said Dr Joel Goldstein, leader of the CMS activity in Bristol's School of Physics. The Higgs boson is the essential connection between the mathematical theory of the Universe, and the everyday world. Without it, the fundamental particles which make up atoms would be massless, completely at odds with what we observe. At a deeper level, the Higgs allows two of the four forces of nature to be treated as one simpler phenomenon, and completes the 'Standard Model' of particle physics first proposed in the 1970s. Results announced today at CERN show that a new heavy particle has been identified, with all the properties expected of the Higgs. Bristol physicists working at the CMS experiment played a key role in establishing this exciting new result which is the culmination of twenty years' work.
It looks like the elusive Higgs-Boson particle has been found! The long sought after sub-atomic particle, long postulated, has been extremely difficult to confirm by experiments. Now experimenters using the Large Hadron collider in Geneva, Switzland seem to have finally observed the decay products of the Higgs-Boson particle.
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"If the Higgs has been finally identified, this will be the biggest discovery in particle physics for forty years," said Dr Joel Goldstein, leader of the CMS activity in Bristol's School of Physics.
The Higgs boson is the essential connection between the mathematical theory of the Universe, and the everyday world. Without it, the fundamental particles which make up atoms would be massless, completely at odds with what we observe. At a deeper level, the Higgs allows two of the four forces of nature to be treated as one simpler phenomenon, and completes the 'Standard Model' of particle physics first proposed in the 1970s.
Results announced today at CERN show that a new heavy particle has been identified, with all the properties expected of the Higgs. Bristol physicists working at the CMS experiment played a key role in establishing this exciting new result which is the culmination of twenty years' work.
The Higgs boson is the essential connection between the mathematical theory of the Universe, and the everyday world. Without it, the fundamental particles which make up atoms would be massless, completely at odds with what we observe. At a deeper level, the Higgs allows two of the four forces of nature to be treated as one simpler phenomenon, and completes the 'Standard Model' of particle physics first proposed in the 1970s.
The search for the Higgs requires the careful study of thousands of trillions of particle collisions at incredibly high energies. The LHC accelerates beams of protons around a 27km ring on the Swiss-French border. On collision, the protons’ energy is converted to new particles, which are detected by a series of huge and complex experiments. From around a billion collisions per second, a Higgs boson is expected to be produced around once per minute – but only a fraction of these can be detected.
Physicists at the University of Bristol have been working since 1993 to build and operate the CMS experiment. Weighing in at around 12,000 tonnes, the experiment is the size of a large building, and is packed with sensitive particle detectors which must operate around the clock. The electromagnetic calorimeter endcap detector, built by a team of physicists from Bristol and other UK universities, has played a vital role in spotting the decay of the Higgs boson to photons, the most important way of finding the new particle. The CMS detector produces 40,000 gigabytes of information per second when operating at full speed. Every byte of data is filtered, processed and then transferred along optical fibres to countries around the world, using equipment and software developed at Bristol.
LHC collision event at CMS showing four high energy muons (CMS Higgs search) (Screen capture from video at Bristol University)
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