Rob McPherson has spent the past 15 years chasing Higgs. He moved to CERN after finishing his PhD at Princeton University, and spent years working at the Large Electron Positron, the predecessor of the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva.
Now, the University of Victoria professor is Canada’s principal investigator in the quest for the particle.
In the past two decades, he figures Canada has put about $100-million toward this project. Canadian researchers helped design one of the detectors, a calorimeter that reads these particles’ energy, in this case by smacking photons into super-cold liquid argon and measuring the electromagnetic showers that spray off.
The sci-fi quest captured the public imagination – especially after Leon Lederman’s 1993 book The God Particle: If the universe is the answer, what is the question?
That book brought Higgs into pop-culture discourse. The “God particle” term also irked some particle-physics purists, who argue there’s no good reason to assign deity-like qualities to a subatomic particle that, itself, is really just a byproduct of the field that gives matter mass.
“Here is this beautiful theory … it’s all been done with the scientific method,” Dr. Garisto argued. “To come in at the last minute and describe it using a deity does disservice to the science, but it also does disservice to religion.”
Tuesday’s announcement is actually early: Scientists from the two parallel Higgs-pursuing experiments weren’t expected to present their findings for more than a year.
In part, the change in schedule is the result of better-than-expected data from the Large Hadron Collider.
But as Europe roils in the grips of a financial crisis, it’s also a good time to remind its leaders why a highly abstract research project costing one billion Swiss francs a year, is worth the cash.
“The CERN director clearly wanted to have some conclusion from this year’s data-taking, the way things are going in Europe,” said William Trischuk, University of Toronto professor and director of the Institute of Particle Physics. “His budget is certainly under pressure.”
What’s at stake?
Everything – and nothing.
If Tuesday’s announcement points towards a Higgs boson with a mass between 114 and 141 gigaelectronvolts (about the equivalent of two copper atoms), it would be one of the most significant scientific discoveries in a generation.
But it would prove a theory most physicists have been using for years. And it could take a decade to confirm the Higgs boson’s existence definitively enough to satisfy the scientific community.
The next stage is what Prof. McPherson calls “new physics” – the quest for information beyond the Standard Model.
One quest the Large Hadron Collider and its high-tech successors may take on is the search for “cold, dark matter” – the stuff believed to take up 80 per cent of the universe’s matter, but with no electric charge.
There are no direct practical applications for the science of finding Higgs. But the indirect benefits have been numerous: Variations on the calorimeter Canadians helped design, for example, are used in radiation imaging, Prof. McPherson said.
If the particle didn’t exist, equations outlining how matter works, why it has mass and how it interacts with other matter would unravel. Every textbook on particle physics would need to be ripped up and rewritten.
But to be honest, Prof. McPherson would rather find out there’s no Higgs boson at all, rather than discover a particle that conforms perfectly to Peter Higgs’s theory – with no further revelations.
“It would be a letdown,” he confessed. “We will have really missed a big opportunity for a deeper understanding of how matter came to be.”
If there were no Higgs, “almost all of our computations of what we should see next at the LHC break down. … But that’s okay.”
