AP
Convincing: The chances of error in the measurements are 1 in 3.5 million, sufficient to claim a discovery.
The ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus) collaboration at
CERN has announced the sighting of a Higgs boson-like particle in the
energy window of 125.3 ± 0.6 GeV. The observation has been made with a
statistical significance of 5 sigma. This means the chances of error in
their measurements are 1 in 3.5 million, sufficient to claim a discovery
and publish papers detailing the efforts in the hunt.
Rolf-Dieter
Heuer, Director General of CERN since 2009, said at the special
conference called by CERN in Geneva, “It was a global effort, it is a
global effort. It is a global success.” He expressed great optimism and
concluded the conference saying this was “only the beginning.”
Another
collaboration, called CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid), announced the mass
of the Higgs-like particle with a 4.9 sigma result. While insufficient
to claim a discovery, it does indicate only a one-in-two-million chance
of error.
Joe Incandela, CMS spokesman, added, “We’re reaching into the fabric of the universe at a level we’ve never done before.”
The
LHC will continue to run its experiments so that results revealed on
Wednesday can be revalidated before it shuts down at the end of the year
for maintenance. Even so, by 2013, scientists, such as Dr. Rahul Sinha,
a participant of the Belle Collaboration in Japan, are confident that a
conclusive result will be out.
“The LHC has the
highest beam energy in the world now. The experiment was designed to
yield quick results. With its high luminosity, it quickly narrowed down
the energy-ranges. I’m sure that by the end of the year, we will have a
definite word on the Higgs boson’s properties,” he said.
However,
even though the Standard Model, the framework of all fundamental
particles and the dominating explanatory model in physics today,
predicted the particle’s existence, slight deviations have been observed
in terms of the particle’s predicted mass. Even more: zeroing in on the
mass of the Higgs-like particle doesn’t mean the model is complete.
While an answer to the question of mass formation took 50 years to be
reached, physicists are yet to understand many phenomena. For instance,
why aren’t the four fundamental forces of nature equally strong?
The
weak, nuclear, electromagnetic, and gravitational forces were born in
the first few moments succeeding the Big Bang 13.75 billion years ago.
Of these, the weak force is, for some reason, almost 1 billion,
trillion, trillion times stronger than the gravitational force! Called
the hierarchy problem, it evades a Standard Model explanation.
In
response, many theories were proposed. One theory, called supersymmetry
(SUSY), proposed that all fermions, which are particles with
half-integer spin, were paired with a corresponding boson, or particles
with integer spin. Particle spin is the term quantum mechanics
attributes to the particle’s rotation around an axis.
Technicolor
was the second framework. It rejects the Higgs mechanism, a process
through which the Higgs boson couples stronger with some particles and
weaker with others, making them heavier and lighter, respectively.
Instead,
it proposes a new form of interaction with initially-massless fermions.
The short-lived particles required to certify this framework are
accessible at the LHC. Now, with a Higgs-like particle having been
spotted with a significant confidence level, the future of Technicolor
seems uncertain. However, “significant constraints” have been imposed on
the validity of these and such theories, labelled New Physics,
according to Prof. M.V.N. Murthy of the Institute of Mathematical
Sciences (IMS), whose current research focuses on high-energy physics.
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