© 2011 Anne-Muriel Brouet
© 2011 French-speaking Association of Readers of the Urantia Book
| The Etern-Feminine Wing | Le Lien Urantien — Issue 57 — Winter 2011 | The Life of the Masters (extracts) |
The Higgs boson is named after the British physicist Peter Higgs. Many elementary particles are bosons, such as the photon, the particle of light postulated by Einstein. The Higgs boson is a key part of the theory that describes the universe, known as the Standard Model (SM). In the SM, the Higgs boson—abbreviated Higgs—explains why fundamental particles have masses. In the summer of 1964, Peter Higgs and other physicists postulated that there was a field that filled all of space. Each particle acquired its own mass by interacting with this “Higgs field.” Those that interacted strongly with the field had greater masses than those that interacted weakly, in the same way that a streamlined racing car can penetrate air more easily than a bus. A virtual particle, the Higgs boson, is associated with this mechanism. But all this remains conditional, because for the moment, the Higgs boson only exists on paper.
“I see the Higgs boson as an exit door from the Standard Model to the outside world. Whether it exists or not.” John Ellis, physicist at CERN
The Higgs boson is surrounded. What if it didn’t exist? Without the particle tracked for 46 years, physicists will have to open up new dimensions.
Building the most powerful and complex machine in the world to track down a tiny particle. And dreaming that the latter does not exist! This is exactly what is going through the minds of many physicists this summer. Why? “It is the most interesting possibility, because it calls into question the theoretical construction built for almost fifty years. It would force us to review our model,” summarizes John Ellis, particle physicist at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
It is that with the first results provided by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the fever is rising. This week, the cream of high-energy physics is gathered in Bombay, where CERN is taking the opportunity to present its latest findings which show that the quest for the tiny particle, the Higgs boson (see box opposite), is reduced to an increasingly smaller field.
In other words, the particle, if it exists, has fewer and fewer hiding places to hide. To track down the Higgs boson, physicists look for its mass, the standard of which is that of a proton. Concretely, in two particle detectors - ATLAS and CMS -, they analyze the result of the collisions of two beams of protons circulating at the speed of light in the LHC. “Everything now indicates that if the Higgs boson exists, its mass is between 114 and 130 GeV,” summarizes John Ellis. A range considerably reduced thanks to the LHC, which has made it possible to formally exclude a mass between 145 and 466 GeV (one GeV corresponds more or less to the mass of a proton).
“This neither reduces nor increases the probability of its existence,” says the physicist. “But it gives a better indication of the region where we should look.” However, this interval corresponds to a relatively small mass, which is therefore more difficult to detect.
But, “if the Higgs boson exists, the LHC experiments will soon have to find it. If not, its absence will open the way to new physics”, assured Sergio Bertolucci, director of research at CERN, in Bombay. “The Standard Model, the theory we have today, does not explain everything, explains John Ellis. For example, it says nothing about the hidden matter of the universe which in fact constitutes 80% of its mass. In any case, we need a more complete theory than the Standard Model. I see the Higgs boson as an exit door from the Standard Model to the outside world. Whether it exists or not.”
For twenty years, British physicist Stephen Hawking has been claiming that something is wrong with the Higgs boson. Three years ago, causing consternation in part of the scientific community, he even bet $100 against its existence.
If the father of the theory of mini black holes is right, two theoretical avenues open up to particle physicists. “The first is that the Higgs is not an elementary particle, like a quark, but a composite object, specifies John Ellis. As a result, this explains why it does not behave as predicted by the Standard Model.”
The second theory is more interesting. It consists of completely abandoning the idea of the existence of a Higgs boson. “This would mean that something else interacts with the particles to give them mass. Something that modifies the conditions at the boundary of the space that we know, by adding a fourth or a fifth dimension, advances the CERN scientist. We have not yet detected new dimensions, but they are the ones that could provide an explanation for the fact that certain particles have mass and others do not, and the LHC in principle gives us the means to test this possibility.”
It’s been a long road, but we should soon be able to answer the burning question. Indeed, CERN intends to at least double the volume of data provided to the experiments so far by the end of the year. And “if the LHC continues to operate as well as it does now, by the end of 2012 we will have multiplied by 10 the number of events obtained so far, specifies John Ellis. It will then be impossible for the Higgs to hide.”
Whether it exists or not, the discovery will be major and well worth a Nobel Prize.
Anne-Muriel Brouet
| The Etern-Feminine Wing | Le Lien Urantien — Issue 57 — Winter 2011 | The Life of the Masters (extracts) |