Scientists have been galvinised by experiment results that suggest they may be close to finding the Higgs Bosun particle, writes CLAIRE O'CONNELL
COULD WE be a smidgen closer to finding the Higgs Boson, the particle that was predicted over four decades ago but has eluded the grasp of scientists ever since? Last week at a conference in Grenoble, two groups working on the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern) each revealed tantalising signals from their experiments, which sparked off a flurry of excitement, according to an Irish scientist who was there.
It’s not the first time that expectations have been raised in the long search. But what is the Higgs Boson, why is it so keenly sought and why do these findings seem to be such a promising glimmer?
As Dr Ronan McNulty, a senior lecturer at University College Dublin’s school of physics, explains it, the Higgs Boson – sometimes dubbed the “God particle” or the “stuff that makes stuff stuff” – is predicted to give mass to other particles. It’s the missing piece in a theory called the standard model, which explains the whole universe in terms of the most fundamental particles.
“It’s no overestimate to say [with the standard model] we are explaining the whole physics of the universe from the Big Bang until now,” he says. “Except, for it all to work, you need one ingredient, and that’s the Higgs Boson.” One place where scientists hope they might “see” the Higgs Boson, should it exist, is in the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. There, protons are raced around a giant ring-shaped underground tunnel before smashing together at high speed. By monitoring the aftermath, scientists look for signals that a Higgs has decayed to form other types of particle, explains Dr McNulty.
He attended the Europhysics conference, where results were being discussed: “Earlier in the week everyone was a bit downcast saying we are never going to find this thing, here we are again, how many times have we been around the block, hoping,” he says.
But he describes how despondency was soon forgotten when it was announced that two separate groups working on the Collider had seen a little bit of a signal in the same place.
“At that point everyone started to get really excited,” says Dr McNulty, who says that two groups seeing a similar signal makes it less likely to be a random fluctuation.
“If you are in a crowd in a football match and you look across and you think you see your mother in the stands and you think it can’t be, then your friend nudges you and says is that your mother over there — then it’s much more likely to be correct.” But he cautions that we should by no means consider the case closed yet.
“This is not a discovery, this is a hint — we will need at least another year until we can say more definitively what is happening but the scientists are excited about it, because after 40 years the chance is there.”
Last year Dr McNulty and his team rediscovered the W and Z boson particles in experiments, and this year they presented more data on their expanded findings at the conference. Their own search for the Higgs Boson has not yielded a signal, but Dr McNulty reckons it may be a matter of time.
“Give us a year or two and maybe it will be there and we can see it, but with the data we have at the moment we can’t say anything.”