The Conversation contributed the article to Space.com's expert voices.
Stephen Jones is an assistant professor of physics at Durham University.
A decade ago, scientists announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, which helps explain why particles have mass. The most important result in the history of the field was the end of a decades-long journey for particle physicists. This was the beginning of a new era of experimental physics.
The predictions of the standard model of particle physics have been confirmed in the past ten years. It raises questions about the limitations of the model, such as whether there is a more fundamental theory of nature.
Physicists can't get enough of the 'God particle' a decade after the discovery.
The mechanism responsible for giving elementary particles mass was predicted by a Physicist in a series of papers. The theory suggests that particles interact with a field. The model says that a field should give rise to a Higgs particle if it wasn't there.
The discovery of this particle would be difficult. Physicists concluded their calculations with an apology (opens in new tab) We apologize to experimentalists for not knowing what the mass of the particle is.
It took until 1989 for the first experiment to start its search for the elusive particle. The idea was to smash particles together with such high energy that a Higgs particle could be created. The maximum energy was just 5% too low and it ran for 11 years.
The most ambitious American collider had begun taking data. The energy of the collider was five times higher than what was achieved in Geneva, so it's likely that it made the Higgs. The signal from the data is hard to get because of the amount of debris. The Tevatron stopped operating in 2011.
The Large Hadron collider was seven times more powerful than the Tevatron. On July 4, 2012 the two independent experiments collected enough data to make a declaration. The theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles was found by Franois Englert and his co-workers.
This makes it seem like it's selling it short. The framework describing particle physics at its smallest scales is broken apart by the absence of the Higgs boson. Elementary particles would be massless and there would be no structure in the universe.
The discovery has raised a lot of questions. There are still experiments being done at the particle collider. The properties of elementary particles are determined by its properties. The results show that our universe is not in a perfect state. The universe could be like ice at the melting point. Rather than going from a solid to a liquid, this would involve changing the laws of nature.
Something might be missing in the calculations if the universe is stable.
After a three-year hiatus for maintenance and upgrades, the collider is back at an even higher energy than before. Finding missing particles that move our universe away from the knife-edge between being stable and rapidly undergoing a phase transition could be aided by this.
Other questions could be answered by the experiment. Dark matter is the invisible substance that makes up most of the matter in the universe. There is no charge for dark matter. There's a unique way of interacting with un charged matter.
Physicists are wondering if the Higgs boson might not be a fundamental particle after all. There could be a new force beyond gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong nuclear forces. There is a force that can bind particles into something.
The results of recent measurement suggest that some particles do not behave the way the standard model suggests. It's important to work out if there is physics to be found beyond the standard model.
The problem will be similar to that of the Tevatron. The energy of the collisions will only reach a certain point. The full arsenal of modern particle physics is at our disposal, but there is a limit to what the LHC can achieve.
A future high-energy collider would allow us to measure the most important properties of the Higgs boson, including how it interacts with other particles. This would determine how the boson interacts with it's field. The underlying process which gives particles mass could be probed by studying this interaction. We need to invent brand new physics if there is a disagreement between the predictions and the measurement.
Our understanding of the origin of dark matter, the birth of our universe, and, perhaps, its ultimate fate, will be influenced by these measurement.
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