It’s been 10 years since proof of the Higgs boson – the elusive particle associated with an invisible mass-giving field – was announced. But for Prof. Daniela Bortoletto, the memories are as fresh as ever.
“I only remember the joy. I remember everyone being so happy. And what surprised me [was] how everyone cared, it seemed like the whole world was celebrating us,” she said.
Now, as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — the monster proton smasher at the European particle laboratory, Cern — prepares to begin its third data-gathering period on Tuesday, experts hope to unlock further secrets of the universe’s fundamental building blocks.
Bortoletto, now head of the department of particle physics at Oxford University and part of the team that discovered the Higgs boson, said her main memory of the events of a decade ago was the moment two weeks before the announcement when the researchers revealed their analysis of the data and saw unequivocal signs of the boson.
“I m still thinking [about] at that point the butterflies in my stomach would appear,” she said. “It was amazing. This is truly a unique moment in the life of a scientist.
The media frenzy when the discovery was announced was enormous, with newspapers, radio and television focusing on a particle as fleeting as it was important.
Dubbed the “God Particle” and named after physicist Peter Higgs, the Higgs boson is the signature particle of the Higgs field, an invisible energy field that permeates the universe. In short, it is the interaction of fundamental particles with this field, interactions believed to have occurred shortly after the big bang when the universe expanded and cooled, that gave them mass.
The existence of the Higgs boson was predicted by the Standard Model, a key theory that explains three of the four fundamental forces of nature, but it wasn’t until seminal experiments at the LHC that scientists found the decisive proof.
Thanks to the discovery of the Higgs boson, scientists can now explain many phenomena: from why electrons have mass and can therefore create a cloud around a nucleus, giving rise to atoms; why the neutron is more massive than the proton and hence why the former decays but the latter is stable.
“The Higgs field explains why atoms exist, why we exist. And the fact that we can put it in a context that we think we understand, I think is pretty cool,” Bortoletto said.
But the story is far from over. Since the announcement in 2012, there have been further revelations – including insights into how the Higgs boson is born and decays and its interactions with heavy particles such as top and bottom quarks. And the work continues apace.
Among other efforts, the scientists hope to study the interactions between the Higgs boson and muons—fundamental, negatively charged subatomic particles—and explore the coupling of the Higgs boson to itself.
“Understanding, for example, the Higgs self-binding could [help us] understand the shape of the Higgs potential and better understand what happened at the beginning of the universe,” Bortoletto said.
Key to this work is the third run of the LHC, which is due to start on Tuesday. This time, the atom smasher will operate at 13.6 trillion electron volts (TeV), up from 13 TeV, with Bortoletto revealing that the Atlas and CMS experiments are expected to double their data sets.
“More data and a little more energy opens up new possibilities,” Bortoletto said. She said scientists will be able to study the Higgs boson in more detail and the work may also provide new insights into the mass of the W boson. Another fundamental particle, the W boson, was at the heart of the sensation earlier this year when researchers from the Collider Detector at Fermilab in the US revealed that their data suggest the particle has a much larger mass than predicted by the Standard Model.
Bortoletto added that there is room for more seminal discoveries.
“There’s a lot of scope in the Higgs sector,” she said. “Again, we have a little bit more energy, we might discover something new, some new particle — we have a chance every time we go higher in energy to discover maybe new physics.”
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