Health & Fitness
Fermilab's In the Thick of Higgs Boson News
The Higgs boson is back in the news, and Fermilab is heavily involved in the science behind its discovery, and the technology for future high-energy physics experiments.
Ever since I got this job, people have been asking me to explain the Higgs boson. Nine months later, I still am struggling with giving a good answer. But I know some people who can explain it well.
One of them is our own Don Lincoln, who put together this video on the Higgs. More than 1.4 million people have watched it. From what I’ve gathered, finding the Higgs – as the scientists working on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland may have done last year – is like fitting together the corners of a jigsaw puzzle. We can make out the framework, but the picture is still not complete.
The Higgs boson has been back in the news recently. Scientists working on the data have announced that they’re even more confident now that what they’ve found is a Higgs. What does that mean? Well, if they’re right, it means a nearly 50-year-old prediction is correct, and we have a much clearer picture of how the universe works.
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Lincoln did a great job of breaking down last week’s announcement in this blog post on PBS’ Nova site. Here’s a quote that sums up the results so far: “If this particle isn’t the Higgs boson, it would be a really bizarre coincidence.”
How does the Higgs search affect Fermilab? More than a lot of people realize, actually. Though some like to play up the international rivalry over high-energy physics, the truth is that any gigantic, complex physics experiment like those at the LHC has to be an international effort.
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Fermilab is a major partner in the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, one of the two major LHC experiments. Fermilab serves as a hub for more than 1,000 CMS scientists working in the United States. About 100 of our own scientists work on CMS and helped discover the particle that seems to be the Higgs. Fermilab houses a remote operations center here on site, where we sift through data coming from CERN, and we provide about a quarter of the computing power for the CMS experiment. And we’re working on components and upgrades for the LHC while you read this.
Furthermore, our scientists and engineers are also constructing and testing the next generation of high-energy accelerator technology. We’re building superconducting radio-frequency cavities—high-tech equipment that propels particles to higher and higher speeds—for use in the next massive physics machines, both here at the lab and elsewhere. That includes the proposed International Linear Collider, the device meant to answer the question, “What comes after the LHC?”
Whatever comes next, Fermilab will be involved. The discovery of the Higgs boson, or whatever impostor it might be, only opens the door to more questions about the nature and origins of our universe. We’re right in the thick of it, and that’s an exciting place to be.
Andre Salles is the media and community relations specialist for Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. He can be reached at asalles@fnal.gov or 630-840-6733.
