Just like Isaac Newton, Galileo and Albert Einstein, I’m not sure exactly when I became aware of Peter Higgs. He has been one of those names that anyone who has even the slightest interest in science, especially physics, has become aware of at some point. Professor Higgs was catapulted to fame by the concept of the Higgs Boson – or God Particle as it became known. Sadly, this shy yet key player in the world of physics passed away earlier this month.
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Peter Higgs was born on 29th May 1929 in Newcastle upon Tyne. He suffered with asthma as a child and, coupled with the family moving around due to his father’s work, was schooled at home for much of his earlier years. Whilst living in Bristol, Higgs’ father had to move to Bedford so Peter and is Mum stayed behind. Eventually he enrolled in Cotham Grammar School in Bristol where he excelled at science and won many prizes for his work. Surprisingly this tended to focus around chemistry rather than physics. It was at Cotham that he became fascinated by quantum mechanics.
By the time he was 17, he had moved to City of London School and here he focussed on mathematics, eventually graduating with a first-class honours degree in physics. His masters came two years later in 1952. In 1954, he was awarded a PhD with a thesis titled ‘Some Problems in the Theory of Molecular Vibrations from the Universe.’ Higgs tried to get a job at Kings College where he earned his PhD but was unsuccessful so moved to the University of Edinburgh and set about answering the question - Why do some particles have mass?
He worked upon the idea that, at the time when the Universe began, particles did not have mass. This was later gained due to interactions with something which became known as the Higgs Field. The concept was a field that permeates through space giving mass to sub-atomic particles like quarks and leptons. His work was an evolution of earlier work from Yoichiro Nambu from the University of Chicago.
Two other groups of scientists published work at similar times with a similar concept, but Higgs’ work published in 1964 was prominent and so the (theoretical) particle, that transferred mass, became known as the Higgs Boson. In the years that followed, scientists hunted for the new particle, chiefly using the Large Hadron Collider at CERN but Higgs retired by 2006 with nothing detected.
The Hadron Collider is a particle accelerator that had been built to simulate conditions equivalent to billionths of a second after the Big Bang. By crashing subatomic particles together and observing the interactions, scientists can probe the very nature of matter. It cost $10bn and it was this that scientists hoped would prove, or otherwise Higgs’ theory.
In 2012, Higgs received word from CERN at the collider ‘Peter should come to the CERN event or he will regret it!’ Higgs went along and to his delight and amazement, and at the age of 83 and 48 years after he published his theory, he heard that the Higgs Boson had finally been discovered. Higgs later said “It’s been a long wait but it might have been even longer, I might not have been still around. At the beginning I had no idea whether a discovery would be made in my lifetime.”
The discovery changed the face of physics and it was this that led to being awarded a Nobel Prize. Higgs didn’t own a mobile phone though and he found out about his award when a neighbour stopped him in the street to congratulate him. It is clear though that Higgs was in it for the science and not the fame that came with his groundbreaking discovery. He was a man who was often referred to as shy and retiring and he will be a great loss to the world of Physics. Professor Higgs died on 8th April 2021.
Just like Isaac Newton, Galileo and Albert Einstein, I’m not sure exactly when I became aware of Peter Higgs. He has been one of those names that anyone who has even the slightest interest in science, especially physics, has become aware of at some point. Professor Higgs was catapulted to fame by the concept of the Higgs Boson – or God Particle as it became known. Sadly, this shy yet key player in the world of physics passed away earlier this month.
Today, researchers from Fermilab announced they have zeroed in further on the mass of the Higgs boson, the controversially-called “God particle”* that is thought to be the key to all mass in the Universe. This news comes just two days before a highly-anticipated announcement by CERN during the ICHEP physics conference in Melbourne, Australia (which is expected by many to confirm actual proof of the Higgs.)
Even after analyzing the data from 500 trillion collisions produced over the past decade at Fermilab’s Tevatron particle collider the Higgs particle has not been identified directly. But a narrower range for its mass has been established with some certainty: according to the research the Higgs, if it exists, has a mass between 115 and 135 GeV/c2.
“Our data strongly point toward the existence of the Higgs boson, but it will take results from the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe to establish a discovery,” said Fermilab’s Rob Roser, cospokesperson for the CDF experiment at DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
Researchers hunt for the Higgs by looking for particles that it breaks down into. With the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, scientists look for energetic photons, while at Fermilab CDF and DZero collaborators have been searching for bottom quarks. Both are viable results expected from the decay of a Higgs particle, “just as a vending machine might return the same amount of change using different combinations of coins.”
Fermilab’s results have a statistical significance of 2.9 sigma, meaning that there’s a 1-in-550 chance that the data was the result of something else entirely. While a 5-sigma significance is required for an official “discovery”, these findings show that the Higgs is running out of places to hide.
“We have developed sophisticated simulation and analysis programs to identify Higgs-like patterns,” said Luciano Ristori, co-spokesperson of the CDF experiment. “Still, it is easier to look for a friend’s face in a sports stadium filled with 100,000 people than to search for a Higgs-like event among trillions of collisions.”
“We achieved a critical step in the search for the Higgs boson. Nobody expected the Tevatron to get this far when it was built in the 1980s.”
– Dmitri Denisov, DZero cospokesperson and physicist at Fermilab
Nearly 50 years since it was proposed, physicists may now be on the edge of exposing this elusive and essential ingredient of… well, everything.
Top image: The Tevatron typically produced about 10 million proton-antiproton collisions per second. Each collision produced hundreds of particles. The CDF and DZero experiments recorded about 200 collisions per second for further analysis. Sub-image: The three-story, 6,000-ton CDF detector recorded snapshots of the particles that emerge when protons and antiprotons collide.(Fermilab)
*And why is it often called the God particle? Because of this book.
