Elusive Higgs Boson “God Particle” Found Say Scientists at LHC

While many around the U.S. were enjoying fireworks over the 4th of July weekend, top Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland had a big announcement based on some fireworks of their own. Using the world’s largest atom smasher, the scientists announced that they are relatively certain that they have at last found the elusive Higgs Boson particle, dubbed the “God Particle.”

The Higgs Boson has earned its name as the “God Particle” for a number of reasons. One of those is that the Higgs Boson particle is the only particle, predicted by the current Standard Model of particle physics, which has not been definitively found. The reason the particle has remained so elusive is due to that fact that the particles only existed in the intense heat and energy which existed just after the birth of the universe – the Big Bang. (Read more from our earlier article)

To find the Higgs Boson and other related particles, physicists use particle accelerators like the LHC to accelerate particles to near light speed and then smash them together. In the instant of the collision, the scientists recreate some of the high energy similar to that of the big bang as the atoms are smashed apart revealing, for an instant, the smaller sub-atomic particles of which all matter is composed.

According to researchers on Wednesday, 2 LCH experiments have detected a new particle with a mass of 125 GeV. The group has indicated that they are nearly 100 percent certain that this new particle is the elusive Higgs Boson.

If confirmed, the discovery would validate the work of Peter Higgs who originally proposed the Higgs mechanism nearly forty years ago which includes the Higgs field, associated with the Boson particle, which is believed to be what gives other particles their mass.

Along with providing proof of the “origin of mass” theory and adding another piece to the Standard Model puzzle, the discovery of the Higgs Boson this week would also lend proof to theories of Supersymmetry and current theories of the Electroweak Force (which unites the electromagnetic force and the weak force responsible for radioactive decay).