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The Discovery of a Higgs Particle at the Large Hadron Collider

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2015

Aleandro Nisati
Aleandro Nisati*
Affiliation:
Istituto Nazionale Fisica Nucleare, P.le A. Moro 2, Rome, 00185, Italy. E-mail: aleandro.nisati@cern.ch
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Abstract

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is the highest energy machine for particle physics research ever built. In the years 2010–2012 this accelerator has collided protons to a centre-mass-energy up to 8 TeV (note that 1 TeV corresponds to the energy of about 1000 protons at rest; the mass of one proton is about 1.67×10–24 g). The events delivered by the LHC have been collected and analysed by four apparatuses placed alongside this machine. The search for the Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model and the search for new particles and fields beyond this theory represent the most important points of the scientific programme of the LHC. In July 2012, the international collaborations ATLAS and CMS, consisting of more than 3000 physicists, announced the discovery of a new neutral particle with a mass of about 125 GeV, whose physics properties are compatible, within present experimental and theoretical uncertainties, to the Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model. This discovery represents a major milestone for particle physics, since it indicates that the hypothesized Higgs mechanism seems to be responsible for the masses of elementary particles, in particular W± and Z0 bosons, as well as fermions (leptons and quarks). The 2013 Physics Nobel Prize has been assigned to F. Englert and P. Higgs, ‘for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider’.

Type
The Erasmus Medal Heinz Nixdorf Memorial Lecture
Information
European Review , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , February 2015 , pp. 57 - 70
Copyright
© Academia Europaea 2015 

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