Still confused about the Higgs boson?

I found this video by Minute Physics on YouTube the other day. It gives a nice and clear explanation of the Higgs boson. So if you are still confused about what all the fuss was about on Wednesday, I recommend that you watch this short video:

Higgs of mass 125.5 GeV discovered

This morning physicists at CERN have finally announced that they have found a new boson with a significance of 5.0 sigma which is required to claim a discovery. Both the CMS and ATLAS detectors agree with the finding of a new boson with a mass of around 125.5 GeV and is consistent with the standard model. However, this is just the beginning, much more data is needed to find out more about its properties.

Due to this new discovery CERN has now decided to delay the LHC’s planned two year shutdown by 3 months. The planned shutdown aims to upgrade the LHC so it can reach 14 TeV.

So the Higgs has finally been found however, there is still no sign of supersymetry, which was tipped to be discovered before the Higgs.

Find out more on CERN’s homepage: http://public.web.cern.ch/public/

Also catch the live press conference here: http://webcast.web.cern.ch/webcast/

Dark matter

The Standard Model describes all of the matter that we know. However, if you study the universe around us carefully, you find that the matter described in the Standard Model only makes up roughly 4% of the universe. The missing mysterious substances have been dubbed dark matter and dark energy.

The Standard Model

Over the centuries, man has always been curious and asked questions about the world. One question which has puzzled both philosophers and physicists alike is the question of “what is matter?”  The Greeks believed that matter was made up of the classical elements, earth, air, fire and water. This idea persisted throughout the Middle Ages and even into the Renaissance, greatly influencing European thought. The idea that matter was made up of small particles, as opposed to the idea that matter could be divided into infinitely smaller quantities, first began as a philosophical concept thought up by Democritus in ancient Greece. It was not until the 19^th century that John Dalton concluded that matter did behave as if it were made up of tiny particles after experimenting with chemicals and their reactions. He named them atoms from the Greek word “atomos” meaning “indivisible.” It was not until 1905 that Albert Einstein proved that atoms existed through careful analysis of Brownian motion.

The Standard Model

Over the last century the field of particle physics has expanded enormously, with the theories and discoveries of thousands of physicists culminating in the breaking down of the universe into its fundamental building blocks. We not only know that matter is made up of atoms, we also know that the atoms themselves are not fundamental and can be broken down further into neutrons, protons and electrons. The theoretical framework that describes the fundamental particles and the forces that describe how they interact is called the Standard Model.

The Standard Model is a culmination of many theoretical and experimental discoveries. The Standard Model was first devised in 1970’s and has been continually updated and improved since then. The Standard Model has been very successful so far, it has predicted several particles such as the W and Z bosons, the gluon and the charm quarks before they were actually observed.