Why finding the ‘god particle’ is a big deal

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This article has been posted to your Facebook page via Scitable LearnCast. ALICE's Evans said he was extremely pleased by the Higgs results but admitted feeling just a bit disappointed that the results weren't more surprising. Wednesday's announcement builds on results from last December, when the ATLAS and CMS teams said their data suggested that the Higgs boson has a mass of about gigaelectron volts GeV —about times the mass of a proton, a positively charged particle in an atom's nucleus.

A two-sigma finding translates to about a 95 percent chance that results are not due to a statistical fluke. While that might seem impressive, it falls short of the stringent five-sigma level that high-energy physicists traditionally require for an official discovery. Five sigma means there's a less than one in a million probability that a finding is due to chance.

The Higgs boson is one of the final puzzle pieces required for a complete understanding of the standard model of physics—the so-far successful theory that explains how fundamental particles interact with the elementary forces of nature. The so-called God particle was proposed in the s by Peter Higgs to explain why some particles, such as quarks—building blocks of protons, among other things—and electrons have mass, while others, such as the light-carrying photon particle, do not.

Higgs's idea was that the universe is bathed in an invisible field similar to a magnetic field. Every particle feels this field—now known as the Higgs field—but to varying degrees.

If a particle can move through this field with little or no interaction, there will be no drag, and that particle will have little or no mass. Alternatively, if a particle interacts significantly with the Higgs field, it will have a higher mass. According to the standard model, if the Higgs field didn't exist, the universe would be a very different place, said SLAC's Peskin, who isn't involved in the LHC experiments. Buried beneath the French-Swiss border, the Large Hadron Collider is essentially a mile-long kilometer-long oval tunnel.

Inside, counter-rotating beams of protons are boosted to nearly the speed of light using an electric field before being magnetically steered into collisions. Exotic fundamental particles—some of which likely haven't existed since the early moments after the big bang—are created in the high-energy crashes. But the odd particles hang around for only fractions of a second before decaying into other particles.

Theory predicts that the Higgs boson's existence is too fleeting to be recorded by LHC instruments, but physicists think they can confirm its creation if they can spot the particles it decays into. Explore a Higgs boson interactive. Now that the Higgs boson—or something like it—has been confirmed to indeed have a mass of around to GeV, scientists have a better idea why the God particle has avoided detection for so long.

This could have led the early universe to contract instead of expand, snuffing it out shortly after its birth. A number of scientists had suggested that new laws of physics or as-yet-undiscovered particles might have stabilized the universe from the peril posed by the Higgs boson. Now Rajantie and his colleagues have found that gravity could solve this mystery instead.

Gravity is a consequence of masses warping the fabric of space and time. To imagine this, think of how bowling balls would deform rubber mats they sit on. The early universe was very dense because it had not had a chance to expand much yet. The "universe could undergo catastrophic vacuum decay, with a bubble of the true vacuum expanding at the speed of light," Hawking wrote. Hawking added that such a scenario would require a "particle accelerator that Story highlights Scientists say they've found new evidence the Higgs boson exists The so-called "God particle" is thought to be a building block of the universe The theoretical particle is key to understanding how universe works, experts say.

Scientists say they have proven the existence of the Higgs boson -- a never-before-seen subatomic particle long thought to be a fundamental building block of the universe. Since researchers have made great strides in the hunt for the so-called "God particle" at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, where scientists at the CERN particle physics laboratory are looking for particles that slip into existence when subatomic particles crash into one another at high energies.

Experts say finding the elusive particle would rank as one of the top scientific achievements of the past 50 years -- a view proved on Tuesday when Francois Englert and Peter Higgs, the two physicists who predicted almost 50 years ago that the particle existed, won the Nobel Prize in Physics.

More Videos The 'God particle': Have we found it? The Number: Search for the God Particle Why is the 'God particle' a big deal? Read more: The woman at the edge of physics. Experts know that elementary particles like quarks and electrons are the foundation upon which all matter in the universe is built.