Word: bosons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
There are no doubt plenty of frontiers left for CERN to push back. Though LEP does not appear to be powerful enough to find the top quark, the "clean" electron-positron collisions could reveal many other exotic phenomena. One long shot is the much-sought Higgs boson, named for British theoretical physicist Peter Higgs, one of the first to recognize its importance. According to some theories, the Higgs boson is what gives all particles their mass. The idea is that everything in the universe is awash in a seaof Higgs bosons, and particles acquire their mass by swimming through this...
...science should be nothing short of spectacular. By the SSC's projected start-up date of 2000, most of the i's and t's of the Standard Model should long since have been dotted and crossed. Finding the Higgs boson should complete the task. But, contends Columbia University's Frank Scuilli, "there are intrinsic limits to the model, and people believe those limits are going to show up in the SSC, along with a whole new layer of matter we didn't know of before...
...that every particle is really a vibrating loop of stringlike material that exists in ten-dimensional space (most of these dimensions are confined to such a small scale that we never notice them). Whether the string takes on the role of a quark or an electron or a Higgs boson depends simply on how it vibrates...
...which split into different forms after the birth of the universe. Some physicists had proposed that electromagnetism and the weak force, for example, might be combined, but their complex theory required the existence of three extremely heavy particles to complete the profile of the weak force: the positive W boson, negative W boson and Z boson. Rubbia decided to chase them down...
Rebuilding the accelerator took five years and $100 million. The particles had to be confined to their separate tracks until the critical moment when enough antiprotons were created to make collisions likely. Sensitive detectors had to be devised that could spot a single boson. (In a typical run, the scientists figured that they would get just one boson in a billion collisions. It would also be extremely shortlived, vanishing in less than a billionth of a billionth of a second.) When the CERN machine went back on line last fall, reaching energies of more than 540 billion electron volts, Rubbia...