Behind the Higgs

Open, global, scientific collaboration is necessary

The success of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in finding a Higgs boson and the implications thereof have been obscured by two coincidences of nomenclature in the Indian media. Some commentators have realised, decades after the event, that an entire class of particles with integral spin is named after an Indian, Satyen Bose. Others have fixated on the fact that Nobelist Leon Lederman once referred to the Higgs as that “elusive God-damned Particle” and was censored by an editor who excised the “damned”. They have called upon a multitude of godmen to explain. The LHC team has actually been very cautious. It’s referring to the discovery as “a Higgs” since it’s not clear whether there’s an entire sub-class of Higgs bosons. But the new particle meets the theoretical predictions and it is the last of the 12 particles predicted by the so-called standard model of physics to be discovered. The Higgs turned out to be light (125 GEV) and its presence was confirmed by two separate experiments. Even with the monstrous energies and data generation capacity of the Large Hadron Collider, it turned out to be quite an exercise, taking almost four years, inclusive of breakdowns. One scientist described it as removing all the water from a lake, teaspoon by teaspoon.

Physics’ standard model is a cobbling together of various bits and pieces of theory. It explains, among other things, processes at the Big Bang instant when the universe came into being. Just after the Bang, a field must have imparted mass to matter. Peter Higgs (working alone), Francois Englert and Robert Brout (in collaboration), Gerald Gulanik, Carl Hagen and Tom Kibble (in collaboration) wrote three papers in the early 1960s postulating what came to be known as a Higgs Field, which imparted mass. Was the Higgs field caused by a particle? Until last week, eminent scientists disagreed — Stephen Hawking has now famously lost a $100 bet to this effect. The buttressing of the standard model may aid a better understanding of mass, which classical physics just considered inherent to matter. Further experiments could confirm if there are other Higgs bosons, with implications for string theory and supersymmetry. In turn, this may lead to a better understanding of gravity (ignored as intractable in the standard model) and perhaps even lead to a Big Crunch Hypothesis about the possible end of the universe. After the LHC’s scheduled upgrade next year, it could return to action in 2014 to investigate such possibilities.

Building the LHC has, in itself, led to several major advances in applied physics. One is in the material sciences and engineering required to build and shield hundreds of kilometres of tunnels and detectors from external stimuli. Processing the vast amounts of data thrown up by the LHC experiments has also led to big advances in grid computing. In fact, this is likely to be the most immediate practical benefit from the LHC. More than a hundred data centres operated in parallel to analyse the data being generated (roughly 12 GB/minute) to isolate interesting events. The final benefit from the LHC is “soft” but very important. Scientists from all around the world and a multitude of academic institutions cooperated to put together the experiments and analyse the results. It was a truly open experiment. Its success showed that science works best when scientists are allowed to cooperate without hindrances.