Higgs Boson

In News

  • The Large Hadron Collider was successfully reignited for the third time  10 years after it enabled scientists to find the elusive ‘God particle’ or Higgs Boson. 

About Higgs boson

  • It is the fundamental particle associated with the Higgs field, a field that gives mass to other fundamental particles such as electrons and quarks. 
  • A particle’s mass determines how much it resists changing its speed or position when it encounters a force. 
    • Not all fundamental particles have mass. 
  • It has a short lifespan. Once it is created during the particle collisions, it sticks around for merely less than a trillionth of a billionth of a second or, more precisely, 1.6 x 10-22 seconds.
  • Timeline 
    • The Higgs boson was proposed in 1964 by Peter Higgs, François Englert, and four other theorists to explain why certain particles have mass. 
    • Scientists confirmed its existence in 2012 through the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland. 
      • This discovery led to the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics being awarded to Higgs and Englert.
  • Significance 
    • Scientists hope to use the Higgs Boson as a tool to learn more about the secrets of the universe, including dark matter

Source:BS

 
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