July 4, 2012 is remembered as a milestone in science, as it is the moment in which the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, through a colossal experiment at the LHC ( the large hadron collider).
Now, the ATLAS experiment has reported on a preliminary result that has excited the scientific community: the confirmation of a prediction of the Standard Model of particle physics , through an experiment that has again implicated the Higgs boson, unfortunately nicknamed “the God particle”. The Standard Model is a set of postulates that was developed in the sixties and that is used, by the way, to understand how the quantum world (particles such as protons and electrons) works.
The study was presented on July 9, 2018 during the 2018 International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP) in Seoul, South Korea.
What this new discovery indicates is that the Higgs field, which ‘gives’ mass to particles, can also be used to provide mass to charged fermions (quarks and leptons) through interactions between atoms, with a force proportional to the particle mass.
Let’s explain this in more detail.
The test, also carried out at the LHC, collided two protons to create an upper pair of quark-top antiquark and a Higss boson decomposing into pairs of b-quarks. The proton-proton collision produced a mass equivalent to 500 protons: the heavier the particle, the more it interacts with the Higgs field.
This result is the verification of a prediction made at the time by the Standard Model, and which is now confirmed: the Higgs coupling constant, a property attributed to the Higgs boson, is proportional to the mass of the particles with those that interact; that is, as we have explained previously, the heavier the particle, the more it will interact with the Higgs field.
For six years since the discovery of the Higgs boson, the ATLAS experiment at CERN has observed about 30 percent of the decays of the Higgs boson predicted in the Standard Model. However, the other 60 percent, which corresponds to the Higgs boson decomposing into pairs of b-quarks, had not yet been observed.
Today, finally, scientists have made this observation, which had remained elusive until now, and which confirms the predictions of the Standard Model of particle physics, giving more force and force to a theory that has been applied since the 1960s.
References:
‘Observation of H → b b ¯ H → bb¯ decays and VH production with the ATLAS detector’. ATLAS-CONF-2018-036.
