CERN Announces Discovery of the Higgs Boson
The Standard Model of particle physics, developed through the mid-20th century, successfully described three of the four fundamental forces and their associated particles, but left unresolved a basic puzzle: why do some particles have mass while others, like the photon, have none? In 1964, several physicists including Peter Higgs, Francois Englert, and Robert Brout independently proposed a solution -- a field permeating all of space that interacts with particles to give them mass, with an associated particle (the Higgs boson) that would be the field's smallest possible excitation. Confirming this prediction required smashing protons together at energies high enough to briefly produce a Higgs boson, which then decays almost instantaneously into other detectable particles -- a task requiring an accelerator far more powerful than any that existed for decades. CERN's Large Hadron Collider, a 27-kilometre ring of superconducting magnets straddling the Swiss-French border near Geneva, began colliding protons in 2010 specifically in pursuit of this goal, among other physics targets. On 4 July 2012, the ATLAS and CMS experiments -- two independent, competing detector collaborations analysing the same collisions -- both announced observation of a new particle at a mass around 125 GeV consistent with the predicted Higgs boson, a result later confirmed through further data analysis. Peter Higgs and Francois Englert were awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics.
- Year: 2012 CE
- Category: Scientific
