Fermilab, CERN Poised to Isolate Fabled 'God Particle'

and the CERN particle physics laboratory in Switzerland could give the world the Higgs boson as a Christmas present—if not this year, then late next year, physicists at both facilities announced this week.

“We have been doing this a long time now, and now we are very close to collecting all the information we need to establish the existence of the Higgs boson,” said Giovanni Punzi, spokesman for the Collider Detector at Fermilab, which has been working with researchers at CERN’s large hadron collider to close in on the elusive subatomic particle.

Researchers at both facilities have observed phenomena that indicate with about 91 percent certainty that the Higgs boson exists, Punzi said. Officially, scientists can claim a subatomic discovery when their findings reach 95 percent probability, or one chance in 3.5 million, that the phenomena aren’t statistical flukes.

So what makes the Higgs boson so important to physicists? It’s the missing piece of the mechanism that they believe gives mass to other subatomic particles, explained Dan Green, head of Fermilab’s CMS Department.

“Particles are all massless when they form," Green said. "We believe they acquire mass through interaction with other particles. The Higgs boson was postulated to give that mass to particles. Without it, when you look at high-energy physics, it all falls apart. That’s why Dr. Lederman called it the 'God particle.'"

If scientists can isolate the Higgs boson, they can record and measure the different ways it acts on its environment. Not only will that help them understand how matter and energy interact and how physical substance is created, it should enable future scientists to invent new technologies to manipulate matter and energy.

“When physicists were first experimenting with nuclear energy, they had no idea whether their findings would be useful in a practical sense,” Punzi said.  “We will learn things (from the Higgs boson) that will have potentially great use in the future.”

As with other subatomic particles, the only way to “see” the Higgs boson is to smash an atom and look at the mass and energy readings of each resultant particle as it decays. During the past 20 years, Fermilab has smashed millions of atoms seeking particles that show the characteristics that the boson must have in order to fit into the Standard Model of how the universe works, Green said. CERN began seeking the boson shortly after it went online last year.

“There comes a time when you have to increase the number of events (atoms smashed) or the level of energy—that’s what the (Large Hadron Collider) is for,” said Green, adding that Fermilab designed and built several key components of the larger, more powerful collider.

Though , researchers should be able to collect enough data by then to considerably narrow the field of mass levels at which the Higgs boson can exist, Punzi asserted.

“We look at different decay channels than the LHC does, mostly in the lower mass regions," Punzi said. "It’s like looking at two faces of the same coin. The regions of high mass have definitely been excluded, so the Higgs boson has to be a low-mass particle. We are very close to the point where we can start narrowing the field from the low-mass end.”

Between the Tevatron’s last findings and continuing results from the Large Hadron Collider, physicists should be able to either locate the Higgs boson or prove that it doesn’t exist sometime between this December and the end of 2012.

“This is a very important thing for our field," Punzi said. "Everyone is waiting for it."

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