The LATEST NEWS can’t go unnoticed! Watching TV or reading newspapers, you surely have learnt that Cern scientists have “found” a new particle consistent with the Higgs Boson, just as Anthony had predicted in his article! Finally, after about 50 years of hunt for this famous particle, they have demonstrated how matter becomes mass. This is one of the most important discoveries that would confirm the Standard model, a set of particles from which all the world around us derives .
There are actually four different categories of primary particles: quarks, which make protons and neutrons, leptons that can be charged (like electrons) and uncharged (like neutrinos), the “force carriers”, that are responsible for phenomena like light, electricity, radioactive decay and last, but not least, the Higgs boson that lets the particles have mass.
After the Big Bang, an invisible force, called the Higgs field, formed with the associated Higgs particles: when a particle (without mass) went across this field, it acquired mass, favouring the formation of the universe as we can see today.
If you don’t know or don’t remember exactly what it is, you can read Anthony’s article about this topic.
Now, let’s see what the effects of this discovery will be. As I said, this finding has confirmed the Standard Model, according to which three of the four fundamental forces (the strong force, the weak force and the electromagnetic force) propagate their effects through quanta, or bosons. So the “Theory of everything” has been partly confirmed but…what about gravity?
A hypothesis states that the gravitational interaction is mediated by an undiscovered elementary particle called the graviton. So the Higgs boson doesn’t close a chapter of modern Physics, but opens lots of doors about scientific research, a new era of Physics.
Moreover, this discovery could be the bridge to understanding the 96% of the still unknown Universe, indeed the matter we can see represents only the 4% of the Universe. The rest is usually called dark matter and dark energy, a sort of invisible force that holds together the largest structures in the Universe. As a result, we can’t say that the Higgs boson is the missing piece of a puzzle: it’s “only” a piece more we didn’t have a few days ago.
The new particle has been discovered thanks to the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), a particle accelerator used by physicists to study the smallest known particles: two beams of subatomic particles (called hadrons) travel in opposite directions inside the accelerator, gaining more and more energy, recreating their conditions just after the Big Bang. According to the latest news, the CMS team found a particle weighing about 125-126 gigaelectonvolts, 133 times heavier than proton, that most probably corresponds to the Higgs boson, indeed the margin of error is very very low.
Now, I suggest watching this short video that shows the joy and emotion of the Cern scientists.