Magazine feature
Hunt for the God particle
Issue 9 of Cosmos, June 2006 by Peter Calamai

Image: Mark Evans

Our understanding of the universe and its origins relies on the existence of an elementary particle no one has ever detected. Now a massive effort is under way to find the very elusive Higgs boson.

Like some medieval cathedral, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has already outlasted some of its builders and will continue in daily use long after most are retired or dead.

And just like those vaulted temples of worship, the LHC commands silent awe from its visitors.
It should. The LHC is the most complicated and expensive scientific experiment ever, with the audacious goal of explaining the ultimate nature of matter.

Just to build the apparatus is costing upwards of a$5 billion (us$3.6 billion). Planning started 20 years ago, the first applied research began 15 years ago, and more than a thousand engineers, technicians and scientists have already been working on this project for at least a decade.

Visiting this cathedral to science, however, isn’t that simple. It’s hidden from most eyes, buried 80 to 100 metres deep as an oval tunnel 27 kilometres in circumference beneath the Swiss and French countryside outside Geneva, enclosing an area big enough to squeeze in Bermuda, Monaco and four Vatican Cities.

There are occasional surface outcroppings – anonymous metal-sided sheds set well back from the roads. And there is a large jumble of nondescript off-white buildings that house the designers, builders and eventual users in a campus-like setting near the France-Switzerland border. But mostly there are cultivated fields, cud-chewing cows and placid villages, with the LHC’s tunnel passing below unseen and largely ignored..

Yet in mid-2007, if all goes according to plan, packets of high-energy protons will be accelerated in opposite directions around the 27 km tunnel, attaining velocities within a whisker of the speed of light, and then be deliberately smashed into each other at four separate locations.

Resembling the chapels in a cathedral, those four locations hold detection experiments. Fitting in with the religious analogy, two are multi-part detectors specifically designed to spot the ‘God Particle’: an elusive and theorised atomic fragment so called because physicists hope it will finally make clear how the universe works at the most basic level.

The God Particle’s real name is the Higgs boson, named after British theoretical physicist Peter Higgs who first proposed its existence. It is believed to be the last missing piece to the puzzle of the so-called Standard Model – the 20 fundamental forces and particles that, in various permutations and combinations, account for everything around us – light, magnetism, gravity and all forms of matter..........


(To read the article in its entirety and continue to have your mind blown, please visit www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/1125 for some brain bleeding information. Amazing stuff!)