Large-scale annihilation of antimatter and matter could theoretically be used in a destructive way - but could it be used to make a bomb? Skip to main content. What is the Higgs boson? Search form Search. Does CERN conduct secret research? What kind or research is undertaken at CERN? Who controls it? How is it funded?
Can antimatter be used as an energy source? What does the name 'CERN' mean? LHC tunnel. More on SciTechDaily. Carl G Morgan December 25, at pm Reply. Hector Holguin December 27, at pm Reply. Steven Dunetz December 27, at am Reply. Clifford Skoog December 27, at am Reply. Leave a comment Cancel reply Email address is optional. Fields are certainly a less intuitive concept than particles, but metaphors are not impossible to come by. It is possible to think of our atmosphere as a field. This field is made of air, and extends from the surface of the earth to the exosphere.
At every point in this field, the air has a particular pressure, and this pressure is constantly in flux. To this point, the analogy is fairly easy to grasp. The air is a field… check. But, if the air was an elementary field, like those predicted by The Standard Model, its basic building block would not be molecules of air, the basic building block would be the field itself.
The things that we perceive as molecules of air, would in this imperfect analogy, actually be small packets of bunched-up air-field. One such problem had to do with the predictions it made about the fundamental forces in nature. The number of elementary particle fields recognized by the standard model has changed over the course of the last years as new fields were discovered, but the four forces involved have remained constant; gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force.
Two of which are immediately familiar. Part of the reason that it is so easy to recognize gravity and electromagnetism is that the agents that carry them are weightless, and therefore can travel over large distances. This idea of a force carrier might seem a little odd at first, but there is a quite commonplace example.
The force of electromagnetism is carried by light. Right now, light is transmitting electromagnetic data from this screen to electromagnetically sensitive receptors in your eyes. The strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force are different. They only operate over short distances. This was a massive problem for the model. According to the math that described these forces, the strong and weak nuclear forces should have also been able to exert their influence over large distances.
In the early s a group of grad students and post-docs were wrestling with this contradiction, and they developed a radical, purely hypothetical way to reconcile it. It exists. Evans attributed the stronger-than-expected results to "a mixture of the LHC doing a fantastic job" and "ATLAS and CMS doing a fantastic job of improving their analysis since December," when the two teams announced a two-sigma observation of signs of a Higgs-like particle.
I think we are working beyond design," the Italian particle physicist added. ALICE's Evans said he was extremely pleased by the Higgs results but admitted feeling just a bit disappointed that the results weren't more surprising.
Wednesday's announcement builds on results from last December, when the ATLAS and CMS teams said their data suggested that the Higgs boson has a mass of about gigaelectron volts GeV —about times the mass of a proton, a positively charged particle in an atom's nucleus. A two-sigma finding translates to about a 95 percent chance that results are not due to a statistical fluke. While that might seem impressive, it falls short of the stringent five-sigma level that high-energy physicists traditionally require for an official discovery.
Five sigma means there's a less than one in a million probability that a finding is due to chance. The Higgs boson is one of the final puzzle pieces required for a complete understanding of the standard model of physics—the so-far successful theory that explains how fundamental particles interact with the elementary forces of nature. The so-called God particle was proposed in the s by Peter Higgs to explain why some particles, such as quarks—building blocks of protons, among other things—and electrons have mass, while others, such as the light-carrying photon particle, do not.
Higgs's idea was that the universe is bathed in an invisible field similar to a magnetic field. Every particle feels this field—now known as the Higgs field—but to varying degrees.
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. Alternatively, if a particle interacts significantly with the Higgs field, it will have a higher mass.
According to the standard model, if the Higgs field didn't exist, the universe would be a very different place, said SLAC's Peskin, who isn't involved in the LHC experiments.
Buried beneath the French-Swiss border, the Large Hadron Collider is essentially a mile-long kilometer-long oval tunnel. Inside, counter-rotating beams of protons are boosted to nearly the speed of light using an electric field before being magnetically steered into collisions.
Exotic fundamental particles—some of which likely haven't existed since the early moments after the big bang—are created in the high-energy crashes. But the odd particles hang around for only fractions of a second before decaying into other particles.
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