How to talk about the Higgs boson
…like you understand what you’re saying. We’ve read reports on the discovery of the Higgs particle with varying degrees of confusion, but this one from Bad Astronomy is comprehensible.
Don’t call it ‘god particle’. Higgs boson evidence: a graphic showing traces of collision of particles similar to those created in the Large Hadron Collider. Photograph: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images in the Guardian.
The Higgs particle is extremely important, because the Standard Model of particle physics – the basic idea of how all particles behave – predicts it exists and is what (indirectly) gives many other particles mass. In other words, the reason electrons, protons, and neutrons have mass is because of this Higgs beastie.
This particle is very hard to detect, because it doesn’t live long. Once it forms it decays in a burst of energy and other particles (think of them as shrapnel) extremely rapidly. The only way to make them is to smash other particles together at incredibly high energies, and look at the resulting collisions. If the Higgs exists, then it will decay and give off a characteristic bit of energy. The problem is, lots of things give off that much energy, so you have to see the Higgs signal on top of all that noise.
So, you have to collide particles over and over again, countless times, to build up that tiny signal from the Higgs decay. The more you do it, the bigger the signal gets, and the more confident you can be that the detection is real…
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
July 7th, 2012 at 00:49
Big Bang Alabang!