higgs boson

higgs boson

The Higgs boson is a hypothetical massive scalar elementary particle predicted to exist by the Standard Model of particle physics. It is the only Standard Model particle not yet observed, but would help explain how otherwise massless elementary particles still manage to construct mass in matter.

In 1993, the UK Science Minister, William Waldegrave, challenged physicists to produce an answer that would fit on one page to the question 'What is the Higgs boson, and why do we want to find it?' The winning entries taken from Physics World Volume 6 Number 9, were by: Mary & Butterworth and Doris & Teplitz.

Physicists have trialed an international computing grid that will help probe the moments following the Big Bang. The Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid will manage data from a huge particle accelerator at CERN in Switzerland, which it is hoped will answer mysteries in particle physics.

The legendary particle that physicists thought explained why matter has mass probably does not exist. So say researchers who have spent a year analysing data from the LEP accelerator at the CERN nuclear physics lab near Geneva.

The theory predicts five Higgs bosons of different masses, which makes the process by which the universe gets its mass more complicated than that laid out by the standard model with its single Higgs.. "But very often, in the history of science, nature likes simple concepts, but it has quite complicated realisations

Scientists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, announced yesterday the first results of the MINOS experiment, which corroborate an experimental result from 1998 that suggested that a class of subatomic particles called neutrinos have mass.