The quest to understand the
origin of the universe had begun long time back. From the bright minds of James
Clerk Maxwell, Hans Christian Oersted, Michael Faraday to the genius mind of
Einstein, all searched and tried to understand and unveil the mystery behind
the origin of universe, its existence and the fundamental particles that led to
it. A major breakthrough that came in this quest was of course made by Albert
Einstein, who combining the ideas of his predecessors brought together the concepts
of light, the electro magnetism, gravity and space-time to bring out his four
dimensional - Theory of Relativity and later a more philosophical proposition -
the Unified field theory.
According to the current
understanding of physics, forces are not transmitted directly between objects,
but instead are described by intermediary entities called fields. All four of
the known fundamental forces are mediated by fields, which in the Standard
Model of particle physics result from exchange of gauge bosons. The four
fundamental forces are - Strong interaction that exists
between neutrons and protons , the Electromagnetic interaction, the Weak
interaction responsible for the radio activity that act on electrons
governed by the W and Z bosons and the Gravitational
interaction that occurs due to the postulated exchange particle named
the graviton. But the Einsteinian theory came to a pause here and the
proceeding further could have only occurred by understanding the initial
moments of Big Bang. Thus all the research come to a convergence to understand
the basic fundamental particles formed at the Big Bang, how they gained mass
and how it led to the formation of the universe.
It was the quest for
understanding this basic fundamental particle responsible for the creation of
the world, the Geneva based European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) had set
up its most ambitious and expensive experiment using the world's largest and highest-energy
particle accelerator – the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC was built to particularly
prove or disprove the existence of the hypothesized Higgs boson. The Higgs
boson or Higgs particle is an elementary particle in the Standard Model of
particle physics, named after Peter Ware
Higgs, the British theoretical physicist who proposed the existence and
behavior of such a particle in 1964 and Prof.
Satyendra Nath Bose, the Indian physicist who provided the foundation for
Bose–Einstein statistics and the theory of the Bose–Einstein condensate. Bosons are those particles that are
governed by Bose–Einstein statistics. In the Standard Model, the Higgs particle
is a boson, a type of particle that allows multiple identical particles to
exist in the same place in the same quantum state, with no spin, electric
charge, or colour charge. It is also very unstable, decaying into other
particles almost immediately.
The Experiment
An experiment of this magnitude,
trying to understand what happened 13.7 billion years before, could only be
conducted using a highly advanced and sophisticated apparatus. Therefore the
CERN designed and built the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in collaboration with
over 10,000 scientists and engineers from over 100 countries from 1998 to 2008.
It was created 574 ft beneath the ground of Franco-Swiss border near Geneva,
Switzerland. As of 2012 the LHC remains one of the largest and most complex
experimental facilities ever built. The protons from the nuclei were
accelerated through 25m diameter concrete tunnel at a speed almost close to the
speed of light(3 meters per second slower than the speed of light) and was made
to collide with each other. The collision becomes an exact replica of what
happened during the Big Bang, reproducing the elementary particles responsible
for the creation of the universe and one among the several particles produced,
was expected to be the God particle – the Higgs Boson. The Higgs Boson is
called the God particle because it is extremely powerful and present everywhere,
and not just that, it is also very hard to find because of its very small
lifetime of 1.56×10−22 sec. The several experiments done prior to the LHC
experiment had suggested the mass of Higgs particle to be within a range of 114
GeV/c2 to 160 GeV/c2. The objective of the LHC experiment
was therefore to further narrow down this range and provide a more precise
estimation of the mass of Higgs Boson, if it really existed. Seven particle
detector experiments were constructed at the Large Hadron Collider, namely ALICE,
ATLAS, CMS, TOTEM, LHCb, LHCf and MoEDAL to search for the existence of Higgs
Boson.
On 4 July 2012, the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) and the Toroidal LHC Apparatus (ATLAS) experimental
teams at the Large Hadron Collider independently announced that they each
confirmed the formal discovery of a previously unknown boson of mass between
125 and 127 GeV/c2, whose behaviour so far has been consistent with
a Standard Model Higgs boson with 99.99 percent accuracy. The LHC is further
continuing its experiments so that the results could be revalidated and could
be confirmed that the particle found is indeed the elusive Higgs boson. If confirmed,
then the finding of Higgs boson will endorse the existence of the Higgs field
that is supposed to be responsible for giving elementary particles their masses
after the Big Bang, which gave shape to the universe as we know it today. If
that happens, then the year 2012 will go down as the greatest year in the
history of Sciences for providing the major breakthrough after Einstein,
unraveling the mysteries of the creation and the existence of the Universe.
Thus Higgs Boson could turn out to be the God particle that redefined God.
