Hunting The Higgs. Physicists may soon nab the most elusive particle of all

slydessertfox · Mar 17, 2012

was reading TIME magazine and came across this.

Sometime within the next few weeks, a team of physicists and engineers plan to settle into position in a control room at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's most powerful particle accelerator, on the outskirts of Geneva. They'll enter a series of commands into their computers, directing trillions of protons to begin moving through a series of exotic-sounding machines--a linear accelerator, a proton synchrotron, a super proton synchrotron--that add speed at every step.

The particles will be split in two groups and sent whirling in opposite directions around an oval tunnel more than 16.5 miles (26.5 km) in circumference and 300 ft. (90 m) underground. Finally, when they're traveling at 99.9999991% of light speed, completing more than 11,000 laps per second, the beams will smash into each other with such force that they'll create tiny fireballs that mimic, in miniature, conditions just after the Big Bang. What emerges from those fireballs could fulfill a quest physicists set out on nearly 50 years ago: the search for the Higgs boson, a particle that must exist if the past five decades of subatomic physics are to make any sense. Finding the Higgs would essentially complete what's known as the standard model of physics, the most comprehensive mathematical description of particles and forces ever created. Failing to confirm it, on the other hand ...
But never mind that second possibility for now, since there's good reason to believe the Higgs will soon be run to ground. Back in December, LHC physicists announced they had seen a hint of the Higgs in data from last year's runs. And just recently, their counterparts at the now shuttered Tevatron accelerator outside Chicago--the world's largest until the LHC came along--declared that they too had found evidence of the Higgs in one of their final experiments. "Assuming the Higgs is there," says Berkeley physicist Beate Heinemann, who has worked at both facilities, "I think it's likely it will be found by the end of this year."
It had better be. In the early days of particle physics, life was simple: atoms had a nucleus made up of protons and (almost always) neutrons, with at least one electron buzzing around the nucleus like an angry bee. By the 1960s, things were more complicated. Protons and neutrons, it seemed, were made of even smaller entities--dubbed quarks--and explaining the forces that acted on the atom required another set of particles, called bosons. Atoms are bonded into molecules and ultimately into planets, potatoes and people by electromagnetism, which acts by tossing photons back and forth from one molecule to the next like tiny beach balls.
Even stranger, physicists became convinced that in the earliest moments after the Big Bang, those particles had no mass at all. Yet in the modern universe, almost all particles except for photons have at least some mass. The question was, What made them change? In 1964, theorists including Scottish physicist Peter Higgs came up with an explanation: the universe is pervaded by an invisible energy field that acts as a sort of cosmic molasses. The harder it is for a particle to slog through this cosmic goop, the greater its mass. Electrons move through the field briskly, so they're light. Protons have a tougher time, so they're more massive.
If this so-called Higgs field really exists, it should give rise to a particle called the Higgs boson--essentially a bit of the field condensed into material form. Detecting the Higgs would vindicate the entire theory in a single stroke. So the folks at the LHC are planning to try to flush the reluctant particle out of hiding. Only a fraction of the particles in an accelerator will collide to make a mini-fireball, and only a fraction of those would produce a Higgs. Even if they do, the particle won't stick around long enough to be detected directly. It will decay almost instantly into more familiar particles, and it's those decay products that physicists look for. The whole thing is so difficult that Nobelist Leon Lederman nicknamed the Higgs "the goddamned particle." His publishers cleaned that up for his popular 1993 book, The God Particle, a name widely used by everyone except physicists.
Tantalizing as the Higgs has been, physicists couldn't begin looking for it before the late 1980s because nobody had an accelerator powerful enough to create sufficiently large fireballs. The Tevatron was a good start, but it wasn't until 2008 that the LHC went online and began smashing protons together with a force of an unheard-of 3.5 trillion electron volts--and that's only half its eventual capacity. (The Tevatron topped out at 1 trillion.)
From then until the LHC shut down last year for maintenance, billions of tiny fireballs flared and died while detectors looked for the fragments of the collisions. In the case of the Higgs, the key debris would be a pair of photons measuring from 115 billion to 180 billion electron volts. An electron volt sounds like a unit of energy, but it's really a measure of mass (and as Albert Einstein showed, the two are interchangeable anyway).
Back in December, the LHC saw suspicious activity at about 124 billion to 126 billion electron volts--within the Higgs' sweet spot. Then in early March, Tevatron scientists, analyzing data from their accelerator's farewell runs, came up with similar findings, though in a less precise range of 115 billion to 135 billion. Taken together, the reports reinforce the sense that the Higgs boson is nearly in the bag. Assuming it's indeed nabbed, that hardly spells the end for modern physics or the LHC. The standard model doesn't incorporate gravity, for example. It also doesn't explain the invisible dark matter that makes up 80% of the universe.
Finally, there's the possibility that something will show up in the LHC's detectors that nobody even imagines. In 1936, when the muon, a then unknown particle, was discovered, physicist I.I. Rabi famously asked--as though an exotic dish had turned up in a Chinese-food delivery--"Who ordered that?" The Higgs, of course, has been on physicists' menu for 48 years. In as little as a few months, the LHC could serve it up.

Thoughts?

thelistener · Mar 18, 2012

could you just make a summary of that article?

edit: i read it later

Karakoran · Mar 18, 2012

tl;dr

slydessertfox · Mar 19, 2012

thelisener said: ↑

could you just make a summary of that article?

edit: i read it later

I am terrible at summarizing.

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Hunting The Higgs. Physicists may soon nab the most elusive particle of all

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Hunting The Higgs. Physicists may soon nab the most elusive particle of all

slydessertfox Total War Branch Head

thelistener Well-Known Member

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slydessertfox Total War Branch Head

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