Particle Accelerators and the Higgs Boson

This article starts off with an analogy between the current state of physics and a card game known as three-card monte. This game of course being the one where there are 3 cards with which the dealer proceeds to shuffle up to your confusion so you can guess which card you chose in the beginning and put money on it. In reference to physics and especially the search for new sub-atomic particles the author says "It's easy until you actually put down money, and suddenly all your guesses are wrong."

On the technology side, it talks about the two major particle accelerators in the world and what exactly they might be looking for. The article discusses briefly about these two particle accelerators, one located in Illinois (which I didn't even know about it) and the other one in Geneva, France. What exactly are these giant technological structures looking for, or what would constitute a big discovery? Sightings of new elementary particles would certainly be one answer, but it seems one of the main aims is to acquire evidence of the mysterious Higgs boson.

The Higgs boson, as described in the article, is the grounding and so-called last undiscovered piece of our sometimes called, "Standard Model" of physics. If it for some reason turned out that it didn't exist, then we would have to re-write a good deal of our commonly accepted theories. Ironically, through a series of technological advances, the only evidence we have of the Higgs up to now is where it most likely doesn't exist. This range they believe it not to exist is in a spectrum between 115 billion to 200 billion electron volts. For a contrast of this favored unit of physicists for mass and energy, a proton is about a billion electron volts and an electron is about a million electron volts. The particle accelerators have shown a small amount of data that would be some empirical evidence for the Higgs, but they have yet to count out unlucky fluctuations or backgrounds noise as confounds for this surprising jump in data.

Some of the scientists working with this technology are confident that they will have enough data to verify the Higgs soon though, maybe this year even. Most tend to disagree how long it will take to discover it though. Many mysteries still pervade physicists, although most agree that the verification of the Biggs through these technological masterpieces would be a giant leap in the standard model of physics. Leaps in technology, like the particle accelerators, give our mind extensions in understanding the sub-atomic nature of our very being.

References

Overbye , DO (August 1, 2011). Particle Labs Full of Spin and Fury, Signifying Something. Retrieved 9/10/2011, from http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/02/science/space/02particle.html?_r=2&ref=space

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