So who is this Higgs guy anyway and why is he a boson?

If you have been following the story of the LHC in any way over the past few months you cannot fail to have seen the name ‘Higgs boson’ bandied about a great deal. The phrase ‘God particle’ is also used, especially in the more tabloid press who probably think it makes for better headlines. Personally speaking the latter name makes me shudder but I can understand why they like to use it, although the reason usually given for the origin of this name is incorrect. The name ‘God particle’ has nothing to do with any deity-like power it may have, but rather comes from the fact that one of the early scientists who wrote about it wanted to call it the ‘goddamn particle’ because it was proving so elusive, but his publishers would not let him use the phrase, which was then shortened to ‘God’.

One of the foundations of modern physics is the so called ‘Standard Model’. This is the name for a way of describing all of the known (and theoretically predicted) particles which go to make up the everyday matter we see around us (rocks, trees, burgers – all the important constituents on the Universe). You will have heard of some of these particles – electrons, protons, neutrons are all well known and understood – electrons are what move down a wire when an electric current flows, neutrons play a major role in the production of nuclear energy and so on.

Many of the constituents of the Standard Model however are much more mysterious and less well known. Most of these have been detected in particle accelerators around the world, many had in fact already been predicted theoretically before they were ever ‘observed’ experimentally, and most of the time they turned out to have just the mass and energy that the theorists had calculated they should.

There is still one major gap in the experimental evidence however, and this gap is expected to be plugged by the Higgs boson.

Peter Higgs is an English physicist who wrote down the equations describing the way in which most of the matter in the Universe is endowed with mass, the mechanism requires the existence of a specific super heavy particle, now known as the Higgs boson.

Peter Higgs, the man who started all the trouble in the first place (Picture credit Gert-Martin Greuel)

  

A boson is just the name for a group of fundamental particles which play the role of transmitting forces from one place to another (there are currently considered to be four fundamental forces in the Universe – the weak nuclear force, the strong nuclear force, the electromagnetic force and gravity).

The most famous boson is the photon (the same one that Starfleet makes its torpedoes out of). Photons are fairly well understood and easy to create, just switch on a light bulb and billions of them come flooding out every second, some of them impact your retina and you detect them as light.

The Higgs boson has proven a little more elusive, in fact the LHC was constructed with the specific task in mind (amongst others) of creating and then detecting this particle.

This is all marvelous stuff, science being done the way science is suppose to be done – someone draws up a theory, then an experiment is done to test the theory, hopefully results are found which conform to the theoretical predictions and everyone can go home for tea happy in the knowledge that the world is the way they thought it was.

The only trouble is that after nearly two years of operation of this gargantuan experimental apparatus there hasn’t yet been one single Higgs boson spotted. There have been a couple of false alarms but they have turned out to be statistical errors in the data, so far not one single verifiable Higgs particle has been detected. Does this mean that physics as we know it is bunk?

Possibly.

Does this mean that the LHC is a whopping failure?

Far from it – in science a negative result can often be more informative in the long run than actually finding what we set out to prove in the first place. There are still a few corners where the Higgs could be lurking, but they are growing fewer day by day, it is expected that by Christmas 2011 there will be a definitive answer one way or the other as to whether or not this particle exists.

Bearing in mind the news reported yesterday about the possible contravention of the long standing speed of light limit this is proving to be a fascinating time for physics, especially for physicists themselves.

Watch this space…