The Koyal Group InfoMag News: SA contributes to

science breakthrough

South African scientists contributed
significantly towards the knowledge base
that helped an international experiment
make a breakthrough in proving a particle
discovered in July 2012 is a type of
Higgs boson, a finding that could be the
most substantial physics discovery of our
time.

The Higgs particle is the missing piece of
the Standard Model of Physics, a set of
rules that outline the fundamental building blocks of the universe, such as protons,
electrons and atoms. Finding it starts a new era for science, because scientists will
be able to probe previously uninvestigated parts of the universe.

The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) yesterday said the CMS
experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) had found new results on an
important property of the Higgs particle. The discovery of the elusive particle was
announced almost two years ago.

Home-grown contribution

Bruce Mellado, an associate professor at the University of the Witwatersrand's
School of Physics, says the finding is "certainly an important milestone in
determining that what we discovered is a Higgs boson". He notes the ATLAS
experiment, in which SA is involved, has reported a similar result.

Locally, about 70 South Africans are involved in the global project and, while the
team is small in comparison to those from other countries, there are substantial
benefits coming out of its involvement. Four universities are participating in the
programme: Wits, University of Cape Town, the University of Johannesburg, and
the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

As a result, says Mellado, SA has contributed "significantly" towards the
knowledge base that paved the way for yesterday's announcement. The Higgs
boson gives matter mass and holds the physical fabric of the universe together.

Missing piece

The particle is named after Peter Higgs, who, in the 1960s, was one of six authors
who theorised about the existence of the particle. It is commonly called the "God
Particle", after the title of Nobel physicist Leon Lederman's "The God Particle: If
the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?" (1993), according to
Wikipedia.

Yesterday's announcement, hailed as a major breakthrough, is the result of work
done at the LHC, the 2.6 billion "Big Bang" particle accelerator at the centre of
the hunt for the Higgs boson. The LHC has been dubbed the world's largest
experiment and is housed at CERN.

The LHC is the largest scientific instrument ever built. It lies in an underground
tunnel with a circumference of 27km that straddles the French-Swiss border, near
Geneva, and has been heralded as the most important new physics discovery
machine of all time.

"With our ongoing analyses, we are really starting to understand the mechanism in
depth," says CMS spokesperson Tiziano Camporesi. "So far, it is behaving exactly
as predicted by theory."

The LHC was offline for maintenance and upgrading during the last 18 months,
and preparations are now under way for it to restart early in 2015 for its second
three-year run. The experiment will run until 2030 and will be upgraded to 10
times its initial design specification, with the ability to collect 100 times more data.

"Much work has been carried out on the LHC over the last 18 months or so, and it's
effectively a new machine, poised to set us on the path to new discoveries," says
CERN DG Rolf Heuer.