Inside the Higgs Boson
"About five miles out of Geneva, Switzerland, the CERN particle collider is smashing together 40 million pairs of particles together every second, twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year."
This is the crash of the particles that made the higgs boson identified at the Large Hadron Collider.
by Grant Regen
This has been an exciting year in the scientific community. Boatloads of data are pouring in from around the world that is changing our understanding of science. One specific new discovery, though, has set the world on fire. About five miles out of Geneva, Switzerland, the CERN particle collider is smashing together 40 million pairs of particles together every second, twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year. What this particle collider found is
evidence of a new particle named the higgs boson after Peter Higgs, the Nobel Prize winner in physics.
What is this particle, and why is it so important? To start what is a particle?
Well, in this case, particles are subatomic, or smaller than an atom, pieces of matter or energy that all work in different ways. So far scientists have confirmed twelve elementary particles. These are all organized on the Standard Model, a table
showing fundamental particles in specific groupings. Also shown on the standard model are four boson particles. These include the photon, gluon, and the W and Z bosons.
What are bosons? Bosons are force carrying particles that each apply to fundamental forces that govern the universe. These forces include gravity, weak force, electromagnetic force, and
strong force. Each of these forces interacts with the elemental particles that make up regular matter by the exchange of bosons, or types of pure energy. For the force of electromagnetism,
photons are the bosons exchanged. For weak force W and Z bosons are exchanged. For strong force gluons are exchanged. Scientists are still searching for the boson responsible for gravity but have not found the mysterious