![]() ![]() In 2010, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) began colliding protons with seven times more energy than the Tevatron. In 2011, the Tevatron ceased operations - the Higgs boson escaped detection again. But proton-antiproton collisions produce a lot of debris, making it much harder to extract the signal from the data. The Tevatron collided protons (which, along with neutrons, make up the atomic nucleus) and antiprotons (nearly identical to protons but with opposite charge) with an energy five times higher than what was achieved in Geneva - surely, enough to make the Higgs. Meanwhile, the most ambitious American collider in history, the Tevatron (opens in new tab), had started taking data at Fermilab, close to Chicago. It ran for 11 years, but its maximum energy turned out to be just 5% too low to produce the Higgs boson. The idea was to smash particles together with such high energy that a Higgs particle could be created in a 17-mile-long (27 kilometers) tunnel at The European Organization for Nuclear Research (known by its French acronym CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland - the largest electron-positron (a positron is almost identical to an electron but has opposite charge) collider ever built. It took until 1989 for the first experiment with a serious chance of discovering the Higgs boson to begin its search. "We apologize to experimentalists for having no idea what is the mass of the Higgs boson … and for not being sure of its couplings to other particles … For these reasons, we do not want to encourage big experimental searches for the Higgs boson." When three theoretical physicists calculated the properties of a Higgs boson, they concluded with an apology (opens in new tab). And according to the same model, such a field should also give rise to a Higgs particle - meaning if the Higgs boson wasn't there, this would ultimately falsify the entire theory.īut it soon became clear that discovering this particle would be challenging. This theory suggests particle masses are a consequence of elementary particles interacting with a field, dubbed the Higgs field. ![]() #Higgs boson theory seriesPhysicist Peter Higgs (opens in new tab) predicted the Higgs boson in a series of papers between 19, as an inevitable consequence of the mechanism responsible for giving elementary particles mass. ![]()
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