On July 4, 2012, experts from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced that they had finally discovered the Higgs boson. The existence of such a hypothetical particle was predicted about fifty years ago, but it became possible to obtain practical confirmation of this hypothesis only after the launch of the Large Hadron Collider.
In the mid-60s of the last century, a little-known lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, Peter Higgs, predicted the existence of a special particle, which is the basis of the modern model of the universe. It is for this reason that the Higgs boson has been dubbed "the particle of God." The LHC - the Large Hadron Collider, which is a grandiose installation for the study of elementary particles, helped to experimentally confirm the existence of a particle.
Higgs suggested that there is a certain medium or "aggravating" field, flying through which elementary particles begin to interact with it. The stronger the interaction, the slower the particle breaks through the medium, and the more mass this particle has. In the circles of physicists, an idea arose: by means of a powerful accelerator "pinch off" part of the field, arranging a kind of "Big Bang in reverse".
According to the laws of quantum mechanics, the "aggravating" field predicted by Higgs consists of quanta, which are simultaneously both a wave and a particle. The quanta of the hypothetical Higgs field are called bosons in science.
The idea of the experiment was to break a pair consisting of a proton and a Higgs boson with a powerful impact. This would make it possible to see the liberated proton, which has turned without a specific medium into a photon of light and another particle - the sought-for Higgs boson.
The experiments began in the early 1980s at the first collider built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research. At that time, it was not possible to find the Higgs boson, but many encouraging intermediate results were obtained. Subsequently, work continued at the Large Hadron Collider, built in the area of Lake Geneva. New experiments lasted more than eleven years and made it possible to adjust the research parameters, as well as to determine the measurement range.
Several years of waiting and significant expenditures on the research project have paid off. In an official CERN press release dated July 4, 2012, it was cautiously announced that there were clear signs of the existence of a new particle that fits into the framework of the theory put forward by Higgs. Despite the existing small probability of error, most physicists are confident that the search for the Higgs boson has been successfully completed.
