‘God particle’ evidence: Why the Higgs boson matters for mass to exist

By JENNY FYALL
Published on 05/07/2012 01:45

THE confirmation of the existence of the Higgs boson particle is one of the great scientific achievements in history.

Without it the universe, and everything within it, could not exist. As a result it has been nicknamed the God particle.

Up to now the particle has only existed in the minds of theoretical physicists, who, including Professor Peter Higgs, came up with a theory for how the universe works. However, the theory, called the Standard Model, had one glaring hole: it could not explain how particles in the universe gain their mass.

As a result, scientists have spent almost half a century searching for the Higgs boson, which provides an explanation for this. The Higgs mechanism proposes that there is a field permeating the universe – the Higgs field – that allows particles to obtain mass.

The Higgs field has been described as a kind of “cosmic treacle” throughout the universe. Trudging through the field of treacle impedes progress; your shoes interacting with the treacle slows you down.

In a Higgsless universe, everything would behave as light does, floating freely and not combining with anything else. There would be no matter made from conglomerations of protons, neutrons and electrons.

However, despite the Higgs boson providing a neat explanation in theory, proving its existence has been very difficult.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern, in Switzerland, has been searching for it by smashing together two beams of sub-atomic particles to create a vast shower of particles.

The LHC is not the first machine to hunt for the Higgs boson. The Large Electron–Positron Collider (LEP) machine, which ran at Cern from 1989 to 2000, ruled out the Higgs up to a certain mass, while the US Tevatron accelerator searched for the particle above this range until it was switched off in 2011.

On Monday, the Tevatron team released its final analysis, which pointed to a particle such as the one the LHC data suggests.