Hunt for Higgs

This is a good bit of fun for those of us interested in particle physics. You may have heard recently of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – an accelerator that brings protons and ions into head-on collisions at higher energies that ever achieved before. The LHC is an international project and seeks to answer the age-old question – how did our universe come to be the way it is? By getting protons and ions to collide, the LHC may let us see how matter behaved a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang.

The Higgs boson is an undiscovered elementary particle, which gives particles their masses. As a consequence of wave-particle duality, all quantum fields have a fundamental particle associated with them. The particle associated with the Higgs field is called the Higgs boson. It is predicted to exist by the Standard Model of particle physics and yet it is the only Standard Model particle not yet observed. Known as the Holy Grail of particle physics, the Higgs boson is a slippery devil indeed!

But you can go on hunt for Higgs over at Science Museum – enjoy – Before you hunt for Higgs though, there’s a bit of gossip flying around – possibly Higgs has already been discovered, guaranteeing a Nobel Prize to its discoverer. The juicy goss buzzing through the blogosphere is that an accelerator located outside of Chicago (called Tevatron) has found something new – possibly Higgs.