The discovery has been finally made. The Standard model of
quantum physics holds true. The researches and the hard work put up by Peter
Higgs and his team of scientists has finally paid dividends. When Higgs gave
the theoretical model of this particle back in 1964, very few accepted it;
infact he was mocked. When the science community was expecting the found
particle to be the Higgs-boson particle, Stephen Hawking even lost a 100$ bet
with Gordon Kane (of Michigan University), that the results would be different.
Well, a little heads up for those who are expecting concrete results; CERN says
they have found a new particle with 99.999% certainty, it will take some time
to confirm the found particle is indeed the much speculated Higgs-boson or not.
The
particle is nicknamed the ‘God particle’ (obviously by non-scientists), that
brought the attention of media towards this research and resulted in the
jaw-dropping publicity and may have offended some theists due to its nickname. 
To know
more about the whole story, let’s take you back a few years back. A Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was built by
CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) in 2008 (actually it took
about 10 years to be built), at the Swiss- French border near Geneva. Laid in a
27 km length, it was setup to validate the existence of the Higgs- boson
experimentally. According to the theory, two 7 TeV proton beams collide to
create an environment for observing the Higgs-boson particle. Currently, the
LHC can accelerate protons to 4 TeV only, but soon it will be upgraded for
optimum work. For getting better results, researches were carried out by two
teams working independently to ensure that the results that are going to follow
don’t look like a fluke. However, after combining datasets of the two teams,
CMS and ATLAS, the results looked consistent and promising.
It all
started when bosons was discovered in the mid 1920s, which are nothing but
subatomic particles with integer spin. The bosons is named after Satyendra Nath
Bose, who did pioneering work in Bose- Einstein statistics, along with
Einstein. The Higgs boson is an elementary boson, having no spin, is believed
to give mass to other particles via the Higgs mechanism. According to this
mechanism, a particle gains mass in a Higgs field, in the presence of some
fundamental particles. One of the fundamental particle is Higgs boson.
Well!
long story short, if the synthesized particle is proved to be the Higgs boson,
it will surely be a major breakthrough for science. Plus it will firmly cement
the Standard model in science community.
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