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Particle find heralds new dawn for science

Nicola Mawson
By Nicola Mawson, Contributor.
Johannesburg, 05 Jul 2012

The discovery of a Higgs-like particle through two Switzerland-based research projects yesterday heralds a new dawn for science and will spur decades' worth of research into the universe's dark matter and dark energy.

The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) yesterday said the Atlas and CMS experiments had observed a new particle with a mass 134 times that of a proton. The elusive Higgs-like boson gives matter mass and holds the physical fabric of the universe together.

The Higgs particle - or boson - is named after Peter Higgs, who, in the 1960s, was one of six authors who theorised about the existence of the particle. It is commonly called the “God Particle”, after the title of Nobel physicist Leon Lederman's “The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?” (1993), according to Wikipedia.

The Higgs particle is the missing piece of the Standard Model of Physics, which is a set of rules that sets out the fundamental building blocks of the universe such as protons, electrons and atoms.

The discovery of the particle, which behaves like the Higgs boson, will allow scientists to probe previously uninvestigated parts of the universe, although further work has to be done to confirm that it is the Higgs boson.

The announcement, hailed as historic, came in a progress report from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the £2.6 billion “Big Bang” particle accelerator at the centre of the hunt for the Higgs boson. The LHC has been dubbed the world's largest experiment and is housed at CERN.

The LHC is the largest scientific instrument ever built and lies in an underground tunnel with a circumference of 17 miles that straddles the French-Swiss border, near Geneva, and has been heralded as the most important new physics discovery machine of all time.

The final frontier

University of Johannesburg Professor Simon Connell, from the Department of Physics, who contributed to what is being called “one of the biggest observations of any new phenomena”, explains that finding the “missing” particle heralds a new age for science.

Finding the particle means that scientists can connect to areas of nature that they were previously blind to, says Connell. He says there was previously no key that allowed scientists to probe the 96% of the matter of the universe that is unknown and referred to as dark matter and dark energy.

Higgs is the key to understanding mass and unlocking further research, says Connell. He adds that the discovery shows that nature does obey quantum theory, which is the most abstract edifice of physics. “People right now are writing new textbooks.

“Although we don't have a crystal ball to predict the full benefits to science and society, we note that most of today's understanding of nature and the development of technology began with the discovery of the now familiar particles like the electron. We are at a new beginning. The LHC may also shed light on the primordial state of matter, shortly after the 'Big Bang', and on dark matter and dark energy,” says Connell.

“It's hard not to get excited by these results,” says CERN research director Sergio Bertolucci.“We stated last year, that in 2012 we would either find a new Higgs-like particle or exclude the existence of the Standard Model Higgs.

“With all the necessary caution, it looks to me that we are at a branching point: the observation of this new particle indicates the path for the future towards a more detailed understanding of what we're seeing in the data,” says Bertolucci.

Connell adds that the discovery of the Higgs-like boson could be announced, because it passed a statistical test, which in physics is known as 5 sigma. He explains this proved that a new particle, which behaves like Higgs, has definitely been discovered.

Connell explains that the particle was the missing piece of the standard physics model and had previously not been found. He notes that, because it is so heavy, a machine was required to discover the particle.

The LHD corridor was 30 years in the making and required investments from 50 countries, each of which had to commit to spend on it for several generations, explains Connell. He says the aim of the international effort was to find the elusive particle.

More to be done

CERN says the results are labelled preliminary and are based on data collected in 2011 and 2012, with the 2012 data still under analysis. Publication of the analyses presented yesterday is expected around the end of July, while a more complete picture of yesterday's observations will emerge later this year after the LHC provides the experiments with more data.

In December 2011, LHC scientists revealed they had caught a first tantalising glimpse of the particle, says Connell.

The new Higgs-like boson will now be subjected to intense and detailed study, over some decades and, while exploring this, scientists may make further surprising discoveries, says Connell.

CERN says the next step will be to determine the precise nature of the particle and its significance for understanding the universe. Questions - such as are its properties as expected for the long-sought Higgs boson, is it really the final missing ingredient in the Standard Model of particle physics, or is it something more exotic - must be asked.

“We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature,” says CERN DG Rolf Heuer. “The discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson opens the way to more detailed studies, requiring larger statistics, which will pin down the new particle's properties, and is likely to shed light on other mysteries of our universe.”

“Positive identification of the new particle's characteristics will take considerable time and data. But whatever form the Higgs particle takes, our knowledge of the fundamental structure of matter is about to take a major step forward,” says CERN.

Fermilab scientist Don Lincoln describes the nature of the Higgs boson in this video.

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