HIGGS BOSON :The God Particle that could redefine God

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.