The photon, which is the particle of light and carries the electromagnetic force, has no mass at all. Scientists are now studying the characteristic properties of the Higgs boson to determine if it precisely matches the predictions of the Standard Model of particle physics. If the Higgs boson deviates from the model, it may provide clues to new particles that only interact with other Standard Model particles through the Higgs boson and thereby lead to new scientific discoveries.
It is currently the only place scientists can create and study Higgs bosons. They also play leadership roles in many aspects of each experiment. This Machine will breakdown time into sections and help us split the Atom under some control. We would control a piece of time and space. The Large Hadron Collider LHC is considered the largest and most complex thing humans have ever built: it has over fifteen miles of underground tunnels and took thousands of physicists from dozens of countries over a decade to finish.
It has a staggering amount of computing power and requires massive amounts of energy to operate. All of this was done with the sole goal of smashing protons together at Everyone is certain that its there, but nobody has ever seen it.
While the discovery was considered groundbreaking news in the global science community, it still had a certain air of mystery and asterisk around it. Much like observing a miracle before your eyes without seeing God or an angel performing it, it still requires a certain amount of faith to understand and explain.
The giant underground machine with miles of tunnels and thousands of computers is hugely intimidating. Many scientists theorized that truly creating a Higgs Boson under these conditions could instantly end the universe, because the Higgs Field is universal and in constant perfect balance as it is. The two forces can be described within the same theory, which forms the basis of the Standard Model. The basic equations of the unified theory correctly describe the electroweak force and its associated force-carrying particles, namely the photon, and the W and Z bosons, except for a major glitch.
All of these particles emerge without a mass. While this is true for the photon, we know that the W and Z have mass, nearly times that of a proton. Just after the big bang , the Higgs field was zero, but as the universe cooled and the temperature fell below a critical value, the field grew spontaneously so that any particle interacting with it acquired a mass.
The more a particle interacts with this field, the heavier it is. Particles like the photon that do not interact with it are left with no mass at all. Like all fundamental fields, the Higgs field has an associated particle — the Higgs boson. The Higgs field emerged at the birth of the universe and has acted as its own source of energy since then, Lykken said.
Physicists believe the Higgs field may be slowly changing as it tries to find an optimal balance of field strength and energy required to maintain that strength.
Right now the Higgs field is in a minimum potential energy state — like a valley in a field of hills and valleys. The huge amount of energy required to change into another state is like chugging up a hill. If the Higgs field makes it over that energy hill, some physicists think the destruction of the universe is waiting on the other side. But an unlucky quantum fluctuation, or a change in energy, could trigger a process called " quantum tunneling.
This quantum fluctuation will happen somewhere out in the empty vacuum of space between galaxies, and will create a "bubble," Lykken said. Here's how Hawking describes this Higgs doomsday scenario in the new book: "The Higgs potential has the worrisome feature that it might become metastable at energies above [billion] gigaelectronvolts GeV.
This could happen at any time and we wouldn't see it coming.
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