The higgs-boson, the so-believed key in the formation of the universe billions of years ago! For many centuries man has been in search of it. Recently the CERN research experiment is on the way to discover it. Recently the Tevatron collider is also hinting at the search of higgs boson. But the hints seen at the Tevatron are weaker than those reported at the LHC, but occur in the same "search region". Scientists have cautioned that these hints would soon disappear after further analysis.
The Tevatron and LHC machines work on similar basic principles, accelerating beams of particles to high energies around a tunnel before smashing them together. These collisions can generate new particles which can then be picked up by detectors built at the points where particle beams cross over. The LHC(Large Hadron Collider) lies in a 27 kilometer long circular tunnel deep below the French-Swiss border and has two detectors looking for higgs - Atlas and CMS, each looked after by a different team of scientists. The Tevatron has a comparable arrangement, with two detectors called DZero and CDF.
The excess seen by the Atlas team has reached a 2.8 sigma level of certainty. A three-sigma result means there is roughly a one in 1,000 chance that the result is attributable to some statistical quirk in the data.
The existence of the Higgs boson was first proposed in the 1960s by Edinburgh University physicist Peter Higgs. The boson helps confer the property of mass on all other particles through their interaction with something called the Higgs field. The interesting fluctuations seen at the Tevatron and the LHC are dominated by what might be the Higgs decaying into a pair of "W boson" particles. The Tevatron is also seeing the same type of interesting particle events as the LHC. In these events, one elementary particle "decays", or transforms, into another with a smaller mass. But the Tevatron results are currently at the one-sigma level of certainty - a lower level of statistical significance than those presented by the Atlas and CMS teams. The efforts put into finding the boson relate to its status as the last missing piece in the the Standard Model - the most widely accepted theory of particle physics. Five-sigma is the level of certainty generally required for a formal discovery. At this significance level there is about a one in 1,000,000 chance that a bump in the data is just a fluke.
The Standard Model is a framework that explains how the known sub-atomic particles interact with each other. If the Higgs boson is not found, physicists would have to find some other mechanism to explain from where do particles get their mass.
And if it is found, Humanity will have a better understanding of this world !
The Tevatron and LHC machines work on similar basic principles, accelerating beams of particles to high energies around a tunnel before smashing them together. These collisions can generate new particles which can then be picked up by detectors built at the points where particle beams cross over. The LHC(Large Hadron Collider) lies in a 27 kilometer long circular tunnel deep below the French-Swiss border and has two detectors looking for higgs - Atlas and CMS, each looked after by a different team of scientists. The Tevatron has a comparable arrangement, with two detectors called DZero and CDF.
On Friday, the Atlas and CMS teams reported finding what physicists call an "excess" of interesting particle events at a mass of between 140 and 145 gigaelectronvolts (GeV).
Now, the US DZero and CDF experiments have also seen hints of something at about 140GeV. |
| The Tevatron Collider |
The existence of the Higgs boson was first proposed in the 1960s by Edinburgh University physicist Peter Higgs. The boson helps confer the property of mass on all other particles through their interaction with something called the Higgs field. The interesting fluctuations seen at the Tevatron and the LHC are dominated by what might be the Higgs decaying into a pair of "W boson" particles. The Tevatron is also seeing the same type of interesting particle events as the LHC. In these events, one elementary particle "decays", or transforms, into another with a smaller mass. But the Tevatron results are currently at the one-sigma level of certainty - a lower level of statistical significance than those presented by the Atlas and CMS teams. The efforts put into finding the boson relate to its status as the last missing piece in the the Standard Model - the most widely accepted theory of particle physics. Five-sigma is the level of certainty generally required for a formal discovery. At this significance level there is about a one in 1,000,000 chance that a bump in the data is just a fluke.
The Standard Model is a framework that explains how the known sub-atomic particles interact with each other. If the Higgs boson is not found, physicists would have to find some other mechanism to explain from where do particles get their mass.
And if it is found, Humanity will have a better understanding of this world !
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