About the God Particle

SUDIKSHYA REGMI

The universe always has been a mysterious topic for all humans. Every human in this universe tries to unlock the mystery which can conclude about his/her existence. On July 4th the CMS and the ATLAS experimental teams at the Large Hedron Collider announced the formal discovery of a 'God Particle' (previously known as Higgs Boson).

'God Particle' is the name given to the subatomic particle called Higgs Boson.The Boson is named in honor of the Kolkata born scientist’s (Indian physicist Prof. Satyendra Nath Bose) work in the 1920s with Albert Einstein in defining one of two basic classes of subatomic particles. The work describes how photons can be considered particles as well as waves. All particles that follow such behavior, including the Higgs Boson, are called bosons.

Higgs Boson is theoretical, first posited in 1964 by six physicists including the Briton Peter Higgs. He was the first person who proposed the existence of Higgs Boson. Newcastle born professor Peter Higgs, who dreamed up the concept of the particle that now bears his name while walking in the Scottish High Lands, was present at the announcement and wiped a tear. Said Prof. Higgs, “I had no idea this would happen in my life time. We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature.” The particle ‘Higgs Boson‘ was the missing part of the ‘STANDARD MODEL’ of particle physics which deals with the 12 fundamental particles, including Higgs Boson. The fundamental particles deal with the basic building block of the universe and the Standard Model predicts that Higgs Boson is that particle, which would produce the effect of mass. In laymen’s terms, different subatomic particles are responsible for giving matter different properties. One of the most mysterious and important properties is mass. The Higgs Boson, or ‘God Particle’ is believed to be the particle which gives mass to the matter.

Large Hedron Collider is the world’s biggest and most powerful particle accelerator, a 27 km (17-mile) looped pipe that sits in a tunnel 100 meters underground on the Swiss/French border. Here, two beams of protons are fired in opposite directions around it before smashing into each other to create many millions of particle collisions every second in a recreation of the conditions a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, when the Higgs field is believed to have ‘switched on’. To claim a discovery, scientists have said that there is a probability of less than one in a million that their conclusions from the data harvested from the particle accelerator are the result of a statistical fluke.

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