Exciting news in the world of physics today, CERN in Geneva announced the discovery of the Higgs boson and it’s the last particle of the Standard Model of physics to be discovered. The Standard Model is curently the best theory on sub atomic particles and how they interact and it is able to combine 3 of the 4 fundemental forces in nature together (electromagnetic, weak and strong nuclear force). Gravity & dark energy are playing spoiler right now and there are enough problems/inconsistencies with this theory to suggest there’s something more fundemental out there but in any case it’s still pertty darn awesome.
There’s a 5-in-10 million chance that this is a fluke. That was enough for physicists to declare that the Higgs boson – the world’s most-wanted particle – has been discovered. Rapturous applause, whistles and cheers filled the auditorium at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland.
Almost 50 years after its existence was first predicted, the breakthrough means that the standard model of particle physics, which explains all known particles and the forces that act upon them, is now complete.
A Higgs boson with a mass of around 125 to 126 gigaelectronvolts (GeV) was seen separately by the twin CMS and ATLAS detectors at the Large Hadron Collider, each with a confidence level of 5 sigma, or standard deviations, the heads of the experiments announced today at CERN.
Source: NewScientist
Physicists still need to test whether the observed particle has precisely the properties that the standard model predicts it should, stresses John Ellis, a theorist at Kings College London. For example, researchers must compare the relative rates at which Higgses decay into different combinations of particles, as those rates are predicted by theory. But the fact that the particle was discovered through the predicted decays in the first place suggests it cannot be too wildly different from the standard model Higgs, Ellis acknowledges.
If it really is the Higgs boson, then the discovery will fulfill a prediction made decades ago by Higgs,–although others developed some of the same basic ideas at roughly the same time. That would be just the latest in a handful of profound predictions may by particle physicists. For example, in 1970, theorists predicted the existence of a particle called the charm quark; two experimenters independently discovered the particle in 1974, for which they received the Nobel Prize in physics 2 years later. In 1968, theorists predicted the existence of the W and Z bosons; in 1983, those particles were also discovered. In that case the theory behind the prediction won the Nobel Prize in 1972 and the discovery won it in 1984.
Source: Science
$10 billion was spent to find the Higgs boson and now that we’ve found it (or at least a boson with the right properties) the question is what else can the Large Hadron Collider show us… Hehe it’s not even at full power yet!
Kick ass gentelmen, well done.
