Physicists have been moving closer to confirming the existence of the Higgs Boson particle, also dubbed the “God particle.” On July 4, 2012 an announcement is scheduled to be made regarding the ATLAS and CMS projects conducted via the European Laboratory for Particle Physics or CERN. CERN is the home of the Large Hadron Collider or LHC, a massive piece of equipment used to create conditions that allow physicists to observe the behavior of matter in a controlled setting. According to National Geographic, there is a good chance characteristics of the God particle will be confirmed with 99.99 percent certainty.
The reason why the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle is so important is because it confirms how matter obtains mass and provides more conclusive justification for the Standard Model of Elementary Particles; the Standard Model explains how particles interact and position themselves. Furthermore, these particles create a field known as the Higgs Field. This field is what particles pass through, and in the process acquire mass. Since particles vary in shape and characteristics, some pass through the field with differing speed and ease. Less agile particles travel through the Higgs field more slowly and therefore gain more mass doing so.
A succession of experiments involving the collision of elementary particles, and the subsequent analysis of particle behavior thereafter is believed to both further validate the existence of Higgs Boson particles and their weight. A weight of 125 gigaelectron volts will provide evidence in favor of the Standard Model of Elementary Particles per Wired. According to a BBC Horizon interview with Frank Wilcek, Nobel laureate of theoretical physics, the existence of the Higgs Boson particle within the framework of the standard model further establishes “the game rules of physics.”
A key aspect of the experiments that have been used to detect the presence of Higgs Bosons is the decay of particles such as photons that are collided with each other. Both the LHC and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Tevatron at Fermilab have gathered essential data over time. Tevatron was utilized to narrow the search for the Higgs Boson particle by ruling out weight results for the Higgs Boson. The LHC continued the job and is believed to have confirmed the existence and weight of the Higgs Boson particle.
If the weight of Higgs particle is actually 125 GeV, then it does not help confirm a competing theory in physics called super-symmetry per Wired. Evidence of this mathematically deduced theory would help explain discrepancies and anomalous experimental results that are asymmetrical to data within the standard model. Moreover, super-symmetry particles known to exist have unknown and heavier symmetrical partner particles that if correct, would explain why physicists continue to find non-symmetry in the measurement of known particles.
