![]() That includes how often it’s produced from different processes, which other particles it decays into and how often, and how strong its interactions are with other particles. That in turn confirms the role of the Higgs in some of the fundamental forces – for instance, if the Higgs boson didn’t exist, we’d need a new explanation for things like the nuclear fusion reaction that powers the Sun.ĭuring Run 2 of the LHC, about eight million Higgs bosons were produced, and the ATLAS and CMS teams recently released new studies based on that data. LHC experiments also confirmed one of the main predictions of the Higgs boson – that the other particles in the Standard Model gain their mass by interacting with the Higgs field. Both turned out to be just as the model expected. Its spin, for instance, needed to be zero, and the way it couples to particles needed to be the exact mirror of the way it couples to antiparticles. So what has it been up to in the decade since its discovery?įor the first few years, scientists scrutinized the new particle to check if it had all the properties predicted by the Standard Model. The data from two independent CERN teams, ATLAS and CMS, converged on the same conclusion – they’d found a new particle with a mass around 125.3 GeV and several other Higgs-like properties.įurther experiments confirmed it was the long-sought Higgs boson, earning Peter Higgs and François Englert the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for the original theoretical discovery.Īs exciting as the announcement was at the time, it’s often reported that the Higgs boson has become rather “boring” since then, as it hasn’t unveiled any wild new physics. CERN expected that the data would “ definitely give an answer” by the end of 2012 – confirming either the Higgs boson’s existence or non-existence, once and for all.Īnd sure enough, on July 4, 2012, particle physicists announced the historic discovery of the Higgs boson. It wasn’t a total washout though – each null result helped narrow down the range of possible masses, so that during the early years of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) it shrank to between 115 and 130 GeV.Īttention was particularly focused around 125 GeV, where LHC teams had noticed an excess of events consistent with the Higgs boson. HIGGS BOSON SERIESPhysicists realized that Higgs bosons could be created by smashing particles together at high speeds, and although they would vanish quickly, their signature could be spotted by looking at the resulting particles for those that the Higgs might decay into.Įven with a series of particle colliders running at increasing power, the Higgs boson still evaded detection for the next few decades. It wasn’t until the 1980s that technology finally caught up. ![]() As such, the search was considered impossible for decades. To make matters worse, the mass of the particle could be anywhere from 10 to 1,000 Gigaelectronvolts (GeV). The model indicated that the Higgs boson would decay into other particles almost instantaneously, giving scientists a very tiny window to observe it. Predicting it was one thing, but actually finding it was another. This model predicted that the so-called Higgs field would also give rise to its own particle, and the concept of the Higgs boson was born. ![]() The physicists had been working to answer the question of how elementary particles gain their mass, and calculated that it occurs as they interact with a quantum field that pervades the universe. ![]() Its existence was first predicted in the 1960s by its namesake Peter Higgs, and independently by the team of François Englert and Robert Brout. For a long time, the Higgs was the final missing piece of the puzzle, which was a problem because without it, the rest of the picture didn’t make sense. The Standard Model of particle physics predicts that the universe is made up of 12 elementary matter particles, four force carriers and one final particle that holds it all together – the Higgs boson. But what exactly is this particle, and why is it so important? What has it taught us in the decade since its discovery – and more importantly, what could it teach us in the next decade? ![]() This month marks the 10th anniversary of the discovery of the Higgs boson, a true “Holy Grail” of science that had eluded detection for almost 50 years. ![]()
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