CERN Announces Discovery of the Higgs Boson
Two experiments at CERN announced on 4 July 2012 that they had found a particle consistent with the Higgs boson. The prediction was forty-eight years old. Peter Higgs and, independently, Robert Brout and François Englert and three others had proposed in 1964 a field filling all space that gives mass to the particles that interact with it, which solved a specific problem: the equations describing the weak nuclear force worked only if its carrier particles were massless, and they plainly were not. The mechanism implied a particle of its own, and finding it required an accelerator that did not exist. The Large Hadron Collider was built in a twenty-seven-kilometre tunnel under the French-Swiss border at a cost of some nine billion euros, involved about 10,000 scientists from a hundred countries, and broke nine days after being switched on in 2008, requiring fourteen months of repair. The detection is statistical rather than direct. The particle decays in about a sextillionth of a second, so what is measured is an excess of certain decay products over the expected background, and the standard for a discovery is five standard deviations — roughly a one in three and a half million chance of a fluctuation. Both experiments reached it independently at about 125 gigaelectronvolts. Higgs was in the auditorium and was seen taking off his glasses. He and Englert shared the Nobel Prize the following year; Brout had died in 2011. The name is a historical accident that Higgs himself disliked. Six physicists published the mechanism in three papers in 1964, the particle was called the Higgs boson by others afterwards, and he preferred to call it the scalar boson.
- Year: 2012 CE
- Category: Scientific
