Thursday, March 21, 2013

Chasing the Higgs Boson: Science (NY) Times section demystifies a complex subject

A section of the 17 mile oval- shaped  Large Hadron Collider--  
with superconducting magnets to accelerate particles for collisions (photo courtesy of CERN)

It has been called  'God's Particle.' Others have called it the 'Mother Particle'

 Some have called it a kind of 'cosmic molasses' giving mass to particles as they move through it.

 Fifty years ago, scientists dreamed up the Higgs Boson field to explain why some particles possess  mass and others do not.

So, in 1998,  the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest and most expensive piece of scientific equipment was officially turned on. It is capable of propelling subatomic particles at nearly the speed of light around a 17 mile racetrack to collide protons.

The collisions are to simulate the precise moment of the first big bang when our universe was only a trillionth of a second old. At precisely this instant, it is theorized that the first Higgs boson was created!

Two detectors-- each 7 stories high-- were built to record the collisions at the rate of 40 million pictures per second.

Over 1,000 trillion proton-proton collisions needed to be analyzed to find the elusive distinct 'bump' of the Higgs particle.

And so two teams (Atlas and CMS), each consisting of 3,000 scientists have spent over 10 billion dollars (and counting) to analyze the data.

Then on July 4, 2012- accompanied by cheering and champagne- in CERN headquarters outside Geneva, Dr. Incandela head of the CMA group reported that the two groups had observed a new boson with a mass of 125.3. GeV and a standard deviation of 4.9.

This was a enough to confirm the existence of a Higgs boson-like particle.

My simplification of the described events was aided in great part by the March 5th, 2013 edition of the New York Times Science section--entirely devoted-- with many excellent articles-- to this fascinating subject.

I was amazed at the clarity of presentation.

I was amazed at the excellent graphics which helped to demystify the subject.

The online edition of the printed version is further enhanced by animated graphics depicting the Higgs Boson field in metaphorical terms, a video aptly named Collision Course and links to past articles.

Kudos to the New York Times staff on a stimulating and informative presentation.
 

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