## Wednesday, October 9, 2013

### THE DISCOVERY : GOD PARTICLES

Recently, you all must have received the news of Higgs and Englert receiving Noble Prize for discovery of GOD PARTICLES. Well, what are these GOD PARTICLES, after all? They are actually HIGG'S PARTICLES, named after physicist Peter Higgs. There are two types of particles of matter - Higg's boson and Fermions. In particle physics , elementary particles and forces give rise to the world around us. Nowadays, physicists explain the behaviour of these particles and how they interact using the Standard Model—a widely accepted and "remarkably" accurate framework based on gauge inverience and symmetries, believed to explain almost everything in the world we see, other than gravity.
But by around 1960 all attempts to create a gauge invariant theory for two of the four fundamental forces had consistently failed at one crucial point: although gauge invariance seemed extremely important, including it seemed to make any theory of electromagnetism and the weak force go haywire, by demanding that either many particles with mass were massless or that non-existent forces and massless particles had to exist. Scientists had no idea how to get past this point.

The potential for the Higgs field, plotted as function of $\phi^0$ and $\phi^3$. It has a Mexican-hat or champagne-bottle profile at the ground.

One possible signature of a Higgs boson from a simulated collision between two protons.

As yet, there are no known immediate technological benefits of finding the Higgs particle. However observers in both media and science point out that when fundamental discoveries are made about our world, their practical uses can take decades to emerge, but are often world-changing when they do.

Credit (for some of the data and pictures) : Wikipedia