(Related: "' God Particle' May Be Five Distinct Particles, New Evidence Shows.")
"If we increase our reach, we may see the brothers of the Higgs," said Samira Hassani, a particle physicist at France's Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique (CEA) who works with CERN. (The Higgs is relatively light, which is another mystery to physicists.)įor instance, a theory called supersymmetry suggests that the Higgs coexists with four other sibling particles that have similar masses but different electrical charges. Since higher-energy beams can reveal particles with heavy mass, the Hadron collider may unveil heavier particles previously unknown to mankind. In 2015, scientists hope to run the collider at 13 TeV. The Higgs boson is number 17-it is completely different than all of the others."įor instance, the Higgs doesn't fit into what was previously two types of particles-matter and force carriers-but instead belongs to a third category, called the scalar, making it the only one of its kind known in the universe.ĭuring its first three-year run, from 2010 through 2012, the collider ran at 7 to 8 tera electron volts (TeV), a unit of energy used in particle physics.
Gianotti, who works with CERN, noted that until last July, "we had discovered 16 elementary particles. "Without this particle, you cannot exist," said Heuer. That's why the Higgs boson is responsible for the much of the mass of matter in the universe. Alternatively, if a particle interacts significantly with the Higgs field, it will have a higher mass. If a particle can move through this field with little or no interaction, there will be no drag, and that particle will have little or no mass. (Read about the God particle in National Geographic magazine.)Īccording to Higgs, the universe is bathed in an invisible field similar to a magnetic field, called the Higgs field. The Higgs boson, proposed five decades ago by British physicist Peter Higgs, explains why some particles, such as quarks-which are the building blocks of protons, among other things-and electrons have mass, while others, such as light-carrying photon particles, do not. "Without This Particle, You Cannot Exist" "There's a huge amount of physics to be done," said Heuer, speaking Monday at a press briefing at the Euroscience Open Forum in Copenhagen. The plan is for the new and improved atom smasher to begin conducting experiments again in January 2015, said Rolf-Dieter Heuer, director general at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which operates the collider. Last week, one-eighth of the giant collider was cooled to its operating temperature of -271.3 degrees Celsius- a temperature colder than outer space-while some accelerators that supply the collider beams were started up for the first time since 2012, when the instrument was shut down for maintenance and upgrades. The Large Hadron Collider uses powerful magnets to smash beams of protons together at nearly the speed of light. "At the moment we don't know as well as the other elementary particles-with a new friend, you want to know him or her better," she said. Housed in an oval-shaped, 17-mile-long (27 kilometer) tunnel beneath the French-Swiss border, a beefed-up Large Hadron Collider could discover even more new particles.įinding the Higgs was only a "starting point," said Fabiola Gianotti, a particle physicist and former spokesperson for the ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus) Experiment, which found the Higgs boson, on Monday. The discovery garnered a 2013 Nobel prize for the theorists who first predicted the existence of the Higgs in the 1960s. Nicknamed the God particle, the subatomic Higgs helps explain why much of the mass in the universe exists. The Large Hadron Collider is best known for detecting the Higgs boson in 2012. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will double its power by running on the highest energy level ever reached by a particle accelerator, scientists announced Monday.
The world's biggest and most powerful particle accelerator, credited with discovering the so-called God particle in 2012, is getting rebooted for what scientists say could be a big second act.
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