'God Particle' Has Been Found?

Bangalore: Scientists at the CERN research centre near Geneva, Switzerland, unveiled the latest results in their search for the Higgs boson or the "God Particle". It is a subatomic particle believed to be the key to the formation of stars, planets and eventually life after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. This god particle is believed to give all matter in the universe size and shape.

The head of the world’s biggest atom smasher said they have discovered a new particle that is consistent with the long-sought Higgs boson. Rolf Heuer, director of the European Centre for Nuclear Research, or CERN, said “we have a discovery” of a new subatomic particle, a boson, that is “consistent with a Higgs boson,” as reported by The Hindu.

The Higgs is the last missing piece of the Standard Model, the theory that describes the fundamental building blocks of the universe. The other 11 particles predicted by the model have been found and finding the Higgs would confirm the model. Ruling it out or finding something more unusual would force to rethink on how the universe is put together.

Scientists think that in the first billionth of a second after the Big Bang, the universe was a gigantic soup of particles racing around at the speed of light without any mass to speak of. It was through their interaction with the Higgs field that they achieved mass and eventually formed the universe.

The two teams hunting for the Higgs at CERN, called Atlas and CMS, now have twice the quantity of data that allowed them to claim 'tantalising glimpses' of the Higgs at the end of last year and this could push their results beyond that threshold.

Further, there is an intrinsic Indian connection to what is happening at CERN - Satyendra Nath Bose. It is Bose after whom the sub-atomic particle 'boson' is named.

His study changed the way Particle Physics has been studied ever since. The Higgs Boson is a particle that is theoretically the reason why all matter in the Universe has mass. The name Higgs Boson came from a British scientist Peter Higgs and Bose. The work done by Bose and Albert Einstein, later added by Higgs, lead to this pioneering day.

"India is like a historic father of the project," Paolo Giubellino, CERN spokesperson had said back in October last year when PTI visited the facility.

( With PTI inputs)