• Question: how has the higgs bossom got to do with your job?

    Asked by sophiepops123 to Kristian, Joel, Tim, Venus, Zachary on 13 Nov 2013. This question was also asked by tobybutterfield.
    • Photo: Zachary Williamson

      Zachary Williamson answered on 13 Nov 2013:

      For me, nothing at all. I’m a neutrino scientist: a neutrino is a completely different type of particle compared to the Higgs Boson. The Higgs Boson is very large and heavy, so you need very energetic atom smashers to discover it (like the one at CERN). Neutrinos are very light and unreactive, and lower energy experiments like the one I work on are better suited to that kind of research.

    • Photo: Kristian Harder

      Kristian Harder answered on 13 Nov 2013:

      First of all, as much as I’d like to work with bossoms, it’s actually called a boson. 🙂 (And Tim pointed out that it’s pronounced more like “bozon”.)

      The closest connection between the Higgs boson and what I do is that I spent some time sifting through LHC data in search of one specific version of a Higgs boson with unusual properties. Normal Higgs bosons are extremely short-lived. Even if we create them in LHC collisions, they don’t go anywhere. They decay into other particles almost rightaway. Now, a few theorists told us that there might be different kinds of Higgs bosons that can fly on for a meter or so before decaying. And I was one of the people who then went off and looked whether such particles really exist. Looks like they don’t. So no Nobel prize for me (or the theorists who predicted this), but good that we checked anyhow. It would be really silly to build such a big and expensive machine and then overlook something as interesting as a long-lived Higgs boson. 🙂

      The rest of my work is only loosely connected with the Higgs boson. Right now, for example, I am working on an improvement to the electronics of our experiment that will increase our chances of seeing new particles, be they more Higgs bosons or other more exotic particles. And I’ve also been involved in planning entirely new experiments, trying to check with simulations that they can see particles such as Higgs bosons much better than the existing experiments, and would thus be worth building.

    • Photo: Joel Goldstein

      Joel Goldstein answered on 14 Nov 2013:

      I work on one of the two experiments that discovered the Higgs boson last year, and I was involved in some of the discussions on that result. I also (like all of my 3000 collaborators) spent some time doing shiftwork to keep the experiment running 24 hours a day, so I like to think that some of the Higgs bosons were seen on my shift….

    • Photo: Tim Hollowood

      Tim Hollowood answered on 15 Nov 2013:

      I like you sense of humour…Higgs bossom. I’ll have to try that one in coffee room today. But on the serious side (yes its boson pronounced bozon) this particle is the most important piece of the article physics because it’s what gives all the other particles their mass. Think of it this way. The Higgs particle , or boson, is liek a small ripple on the Higgs field which is something similar to a magnetic field that fills all of space. Now the other particles find it hard to move through the Higgs field so it acts like glue and this inertia is what we call mass. So that funny named particle is so important for getting the whole picture to work and as a particle physicist that makes it very very special.

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