Particle Colliders and the Universe
Another scary headline appeared on CNET in 2014 proclaiming “Stephen Hawking: God particle could wipe out the Universe.” To understand what Hawking was referring to takes a little bit of work.First of all, what the media calls “the God particle” is what p
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Particle Colliders and the Universe 9.1
The Higgs Boson Misconception !! The Higgs Boson could wipe out the Universe.
Another scary headline appeared on CNET in 2014 proclaiming “Stephen Hawking: God particle could wipe out the Universe.” To understand what Hawking was referring to takes a little bit of work. First of all, what the media calls “the God particle” is what physicists call the Higgs boson. The Higgs boson is a special type of particle that was discovered (to great fanfare) in 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider. In some sense this discovery was the most important since the time of Ernest Rutherford. Among other things, Rutherford was one of the first scientists to study radioactivity. In one of his early papers, he classified the three different types of radiation he had found. He called them alpha rays, beta rays, and gamma rays (also written as α, β, γ, the “ABCs” of the Greek alphabet).
Rutherford’s drawing showing how the radiation coming from a radioactive sample could be separated by a magnetic field. Here alphas are deflected to the left, βs are deflected much more and in the opposite direction, while the γs are unaffected. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2018 105 Y. Nomura et al., Quantum Physics, Mini Black Holes, and the Multiverse, Multiversal Journeys, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41709-7 9
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CHAPTER 9. PARTICLE COLLIDERS AND THE UNIVERSE
Rutherford later showed that the rays he had called alphas were in fact made up of the nuclei of helium atoms. These alphas can be spit out of a nucleus in some types of radioactive decays. With our more modern nomenclature we refer to the class of particles made of quarks as hadrons. The Large Hadron Collider has hadron in its name because it collides protons together, and protons are a type There are six types of quarks of hadron, being made out of three quarks. The alpha is that have somewhat whimsi- made up of two protons and two neutrons, so it is a particcal names. Up, charm, and ular arrangement of 12 quarks. top have a charge equal to two thirds of a proton charge, while down, strange, and bottom have negative charges, one third of the charge of an electron. A proton is made of two up quarks and one down quark, while a neutron is made of one up quark and two down quarks.
The standard model specifies which particles can interact with which, and the strength of each interaction. Applying the combination of quantum mechanics and special relativity (known as quantum field theory) allows us to make very precise predictions that have been verified in an amazing range of experiments. While the gluon and photon are massless, the W has a mass about 80 times as large as a proton mass, while the Z has a mass about 90 times as large as a proton mass. This difference in masses is tied to how they interact differently with the Higgs boson.
The particles that Rutherford called betas turned out to simply be electrons. We now know that there are other particles similar to electrons like muons and neutrinos. None of these particles feel the strong force th
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