The discovery of particles consistent with the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider is announced at CERN.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle collider. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008 in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and hundreds of universities and laboratories, as well as more than 100 countries. It lies in a tunnel 27 kilometres (17 mi) in circumference and as deep as 175 metres (574 ft) beneath the FranceSwitzerland border near Geneva.
The first collisions were achieved in 2010 at an energy of 3.5 teraelectronvolts (TeV) per beam, about four times the previous world record. After upgrades it reached 6.5 TeV per beam (13 TeV total collision energy, the present world record). At the end of 2018, it was shut down for three years for further upgrades.
The collider has four crossing points where the accelerated particles collide. Seven detectors, each designed to detect different phenomena, are positioned around the crossing points. The LHC primarily collides proton beams, but it can also accelerate beams of heavy ions: leadlead collisions and protonlead collisions are typically performed for one month a year.
The LHC's goal is to allow physicists to test the predictions of different theories of particle physics, including measuring the properties of the Higgs boson searching for the large family of new particles predicted by supersymmetric theories, and other unresolved questions in particle physics.
The Higgs boson, sometimes called the Higgs particle, is an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics produced by the quantum excitation of the Higgs field, one of the fields in particle physics theory. In the Standard Model, the Higgs particle is a massive scalar boson with zero spin, even (positive) parity, no electric charge, and no colour charge, that couples to (interacts with) mass. It is also very unstable, decaying into other particles almost immediately.
The Higgs field is a scalar field, with two neutral and two electrically charged components that form a complex doublet of the weak isospin SU(2) symmetry. Its "Mexican hat-shaped" potential has a nonzero value everywhere (including otherwise empty space), which breaks the weak isospin symmetry of the electroweak interaction, and via the Higgs mechanism gives some particles mass.
Both the field and the boson are named after physicist Peter Higgs, who in 1964 along with five other scientists in three teams, proposed the Higgs mechanism, a way that some particles can acquire mass. (All fundamental particles known at the time should be massless at very high energies, but fully explaining how some particles gain mass at lower energies, had been extremely difficult.) If these ideas were correct, a particle known as a scalar boson should also exist, with certain properties. This particle was called the Higgs boson, and could be used to test whether the Higgs field was the correct explanation.
After a 40 year search, a subatomic particle with the expected properties was discovered in 2012 by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. The new particle was subsequently confirmed to match the expected properties of a Higgs boson. Physicists from two of the three teams, Peter Higgs and François Englert, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013 for their theoretical predictions. Although Higgs's name has come to be associated with this theory, several researchers between about 1960 and 1972 independently developed different parts of it.
In the mainstream media, the Higgs boson has often been called the "God particle" from the 1993 book The God Particle by Nobel Laureate Leon Lederman, although the nickname is
not endorsed by many physicists.