Sidebars

The Higgs

The Discovery of a New Form of Matter Will Rewrite the Story of the Quantum Universe.

Today’s standard model of particle physics, with its quarks and leptons and symmetry- linked forces, describes nearly all high-energy phenomena observed with existing particle accelerators. Its accuracy is remarkable, but it only works because of an unverifi ed hypothesis that literally holds everything together: the Higgs mechanism. The standard model makes sense only when a hitherto unobserved fi eld is introduced that in our era of cosmic evolution has condensed into a space-fi lling stuff that gives particles their mass. When this stuff is excited at sufficiently high energy, it should appear as a particle – the Higgs particle. Careful measurements of particles affected by the Higgs have allowed physicists to estimate at what energy it will appear. This energy is at the limit of the Fermilab Tevatron and well within the range of the Large Hadron Collider and the International Linear Collider.