Wall Street Journal presents:
Physicists Close In on a Universal Puzzle
Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Particles collide at an exhibit at CERN, whose scientists hope to discover the Higgs boson, a theoretical particle that could explain how the universe is built.
By GAUTAM NAIK, WSJ
Scientists are making tantalizing progress in the hunt for the elusive Higgs boson, a theoretical particle that could explain how the universe is built, though their data aren’t robust enough yet to claim a conclusive discovery.
On Tuesday, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, near Geneva, Switzerland, said that data from two independent experiments had narrowed the range of the would-be particle’s likely mass.
The Higgs boson is the only particle that the standard model of physics says should be there but hasn’t been observed in an experiment. The model describes how matter is built and particles interact.
Proof that the particle exists would help explain a big puzzle: why some objects in the universe—such as the quark, a constituent of protons—have mass, while other objects—such as photons, the constituent of light—possess only energy.
Keep reading: Physicists Close In on a Universal Puzzle
