What particle did CERN discover?
Table of Contents
What particle did CERN discover?
the Higgs boson
Physicists are celebrating ten years since the Higgs boson’s discovery. But many of its properties remain mysterious. On 4 July 2012, physicists at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory, declared victory in their long search for the Higgs boson.
Where was the God particle discovered?
CERN
This particle was called the Higgs boson, and could be used to test whether the Higgs field was the correct explanation. After a 40 year search, a subatomic particle with the expected properties was discovered in 2012 by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland.
How did CERN discover Higgs boson?
The LHC’s two key experiments — ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus) and CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) — detected the Higgs boson within just two years of beginning operations.
Why is the Higgs boson called the god particle?
The Higgs Boson is better-known by its colloquial name, “the God Particle,” so-called because for a generation, scientists had to take it on faith that it existed.
What does the Higgs boson do?
The Higgs boson is the fundamental particle associated with the Higgs field, a field that gives mass to other fundamental particles such as electrons and quarks. A particle’s mass determines how much it resists changing its speed or position when it encounters a force.
Why is it called the God particle?
The story goes that Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman referred to the Higgs as the “Goddamn Particle.” The nickname was meant to poke fun at how difficult it was to detect the particle. It took nearly half a century and a multi-billion dollar particle accelerator to do it.
What did Stephen Hawkings say about CERN?
In his foreword for the new book Starmus: 5 Years of Man in Space, Stephen Hawking warns that the Higgs boson particle (also called the “God” particle, because monotheism) discovered by CERN scientists in 2012 and thought to give matter its mass, could destroy the Universe and “we wouldn’t see it coming.”
What is the purpose of CERN in Switzerland?
CERN’s main function is to provide the particle accelerators and other infrastructure needed for high-energy physics research – as a result, numerous experiments have been constructed at CERN through international collaborations.
