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- 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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