..‘tis the god particle.
knock, knock. who’s there?
hello, ‘tis the god particle.
(do we have the accelerator?)
maybe. hmmm. wait, what is that exactly?
When scientists created the telescope, did it know about the stars and wanted to learn more about them, or to examine them more?
Read some bit of news on our latest discovery in quantum science - to get you moving forward, faster. To being not eluded by the goings-on & mysteries of tiny space today:
Today at CERN (the world’s leading laboratory for particle physics, headquartered in Geneva, as the European Organisation for Nuclear Research), the Large Hadron Collider collaborations ATLAS and CMS jointly announced the discovery of the Higgs Boson transforming into bottom quarks as it decays. This is predicted to be the most common way for the* Higgs Boson to decay, yet was a difficult signal to isolate because background processes closely mimic the subtle signal. This new discovery is a big step forward in the quest to understand how the Higgs enables fundamental particles to acquire mass.
“The Higgs Boson is an integral component of our universe and theorised to give all fundamental particles their mass”, said Patty McBride, distinguished scientist at the US Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and recently elected as one of the deputy spokespeople of the CMS experiment.
“But we haven’t yet confirmed exactly how this field interacts - or even if it interacts - with all the particles we know about, or if it interacts with dark matter particles, which remain to be detected.”
Higgs Bosons are only produced in roughly one out of a billion LHC collisions and live only a tiny fraction of a second before their energy is converted into a cascade of other particles. Because it’s impossible to see Higgs Boson directly, scientists use these secondary particle decay products to study the Higgs’ properties. Since its discovery in 2012, scientists have been able to identify only about thirty percent of all the predicted Higgs Boson decays.
According to Viviana Cavaliere, a physicist at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, who works on the ATLAS experiment, “finding the Higgs Boson decaying into bottom quarks has been priority number one for the last several years, because of its large decay rate.”
“A fraction of Higgs Bosons could be producing dark matter particles as part of their decay,” said Giacinto Piacquadio, a physicist at Stony Brook University who co-led the Higgs-to-bottom-quarks analysis group. “Because the decay of the Higgs Boson to bottom quarks is so common, we can use it to put constraints on potentially invisible decays as well as use it to probe for new physics directly.”
Even though this decay was the most popular path, spotting it in the experimental data was no walk in the park. Every proton-proton collision at the LHC produces a splattering of subatomic by-products, one of the most common being bottom quarks. These bottom quarks then quickly decay into other kinds of particles, leaving behind vast showers of particles in the detectors. Tracing these particle showers back to two bottom quarks (and then figuring out which ones came from a Higgs Boson) is extremely delicate and labyrinthine work.
“Being able to identify and isolate bottom quarks in the experimental data is a huge challenge and required precise detector calibration and sophisticated b-quark tagging.” said Piacquadio. “We were only able to do these analyses thanks to years of work that came before.”
To sort this process, the ATLAS and CMS collaborations each combined data from the first and second runs of the LHC and then applied complex analysis methods to the data.
And so when the scientists at CERN did the CERN happen upon us or did that happen from 50 years of finding what was in there, those tiny things called atoms? And is being small and tiny something of a cause celeb nowadays?
Maybe.
Finding the tools to break apart atoms as well as finding the huge celestial bodies that we know are out there, are one way of exploring until we find that, beyond the inner borders that guard all our nations, is key to uniting all our dolce vita goals. The finding of which, is certainly divine.