Physicists confirmed on Thursday March 14 that they have discovered the Higgs boson, the so-called "God particle."
The elusive boson will hold major implications for looming questions in physics, including the origin of mass and the completion of the Standard Model.
Scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, announced the discovery of a "Higgs-like" particle in July 2012. They made the discovery using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 17-mile-long ring located underground beneath France and Switzerland, in which particles are smashed together at almost the speed of light, thereby generating other subatomic entities. The physicists felt that one such entity might be the Higgs boson, and after months of findings pointing in that direction, it looks like they were right.
"The preliminary results with the full 2012 data set are magnificent and to me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson, though we still have a long way to go to know what kind of Higgs boson it is," said CERN team lead Joe Incandela in a statement.
The discovery will likely be a strong contender for the Nobel Prize, though that honor might go to the scientists who first proposed the Higgs' existence.
The Higgs boson was predicted in 1964 and was named after Peter Higgs, one of the scientists who believed it to exist. The boson may hold the key to unlocking the origin of mass. Particles are believed to acquire mass as they pass through the Higgs field, which is thought to pervade the universe. The boson would also complete the Standard Model, the dominant theory of particle physics. The only particle predicted by the Standard Model but not discovered is the Higgs boson.
Aside from validating the LHC, the discovery helps explain the electroweak force, a unification between the electromagnetic force and the weak force. It also has important implications for supersymmetry, the idea that every particle has a "superpartner" particle with characteristics that are slightly different. It allows for previously impossible calculations, including one indicating that the universe is inherently doomed.
"This calculation tells you that many tens of billions of years from how there'll be a catastrophe," said Joseph Lykken, theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill. last month. "It may be the universe we live in is inherently unstable, and at some point billions of years from now it's all going to get wiped out."
Data from the LHC will continue to be analyzed and it is still not known if the particle is the one predicted by the Standard Model or one of several bosons indicated by other theories. However, it appears that the former is more likely the case.
"The beautiful new results ... point to the new particle having the spin-parity of a Higgs boson as in the Standard Model," says University of Birmingham Professor Dave Charlton.
