Journey of God Particle

The search for the 'God particle' is over.

Almost half a century after the existence of the Higgs boson – the particle that holds the universe together and gives it substance – was predicted, jubilant scientists announced that they appear to have found it.

Two high-energy photons collide. Their energy (the red lines) is measured in by an electromagnetic calorimeter. The yellow lines are the measured tracks of other particles produced in the collision. The pale blue volume shows the track through which the particles are sent.

Stephen Hawking, who had bet $100 that the Higgs boson would never be found, said: 'This is an important result and should earn Peter Higgs the Nobel Prize.' 

The Higgs boson's role is to give the particles that make up atoms their mass. Without this mass, they would zip around the cosmos, unable to bind together to form the atoms that make stars and planets – and people.

Despite its fabled properties, the particle has eluded previous searches and not all scientists believed in its existence.

The particle accelerator: It is within these tubes that physicists are hunting for the 'God' particle.

To try to pin it down, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva smashed together beams of protons at close to the speed of light, recreating conditions that existed a fraction of a second after the Big Bang.

If Professor Higgs, of Edinburgh University, was right, a few Higgs bosons should have been created in every trillion collisions.

Others were not so reticent. Jim Al-Khalili, professor of physics at the University of Surrey, said: 'After all the hype and speculation, after decades of designing the world's most ambitious experiment and months of careful checking of data, today is the pay-off.

Inside: The giant project is the most enormous piece of scientific apparatus ever constructed, and is buried 100m beneath the ground

 An aerial view of the Swiss-French border, indicating the route of the Large Hadron Collider.

GOD PARTICLE: KEY TO THE COSMOS

The Higgs boson is – or was – a key missing piece in the jigsaw for physicists in trying to understand how the universe works.

Its discovery will allow them to shed new light on the dawn of time and how we came to be here.

Scientists believe that a fraction of a second after the Big Bang that gave birth to the universe, an invisible energy field called the Higgs field formed.

This has been described as a kind of ‘cosmic treacle’ across the universe. As particles passed through it, they picked up mass, giving them size and shape and allowing them to form the atoms that make up you, everything around you and everything in the universe.

This was the theory proposed in 1964 by former grammar school boy Professor Higgs that has now apparently been confirmed.

Without the Higgs field particles would simply whizz around space in the same way as light does.

A boson is a type of sub-atomic particle. Every energy field has a specific particle that governs its interaction with what’s around it.

What yesterday’s news means for the man in the street is unclear but it could lead to discoveries in fields such as medicine, computing and electronics. For physicists it could shed light on other mysteries of the universe.

So far nothing has been observed to account for mass, and the fact that some particles weigh more than others.

According to the theory, the Higgs boson is the emissary of an all-pervading 'Higgs field' that gives matter mass. The more particles interact with the field, the more massive they become and the heavier they are.

And these how the tour of searching of "God Particle" went.

by:-

 Tushar Kumar Roy