Nobel laureate Peter Higgs, who proposed existence of ‘god particle’, dies at 94

Nobel laureate Peter Higgs, who proposed existence of ‘god particle’, dies at 94

Subject: Science and tech

Section: Space

Context:

Nobel prize-winning physicist Peter Higgs, who proposed the existence of the so-called “god particle” that helped explain how matter formed after the Big Bang, has died at age 94.

More on news:

• In 2012, in one of the biggest breakthroughs in physics in decades, scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, announced that they had finally found a Higgs boson using the $10 billion particle collider built in a 17-mile (27-kilometer) tunnel under the Swiss-French border.
• Higgs won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work, alongside Francois Englert of Belgium, who independently came up with the same theory.

About Higgs Boson Particle:

• Higgs predicted the existence of a new particle, the so-called Higgs boson in 1964. 
• In 2012, the Nobel-winning discovery of the Higgs boson(also known as ‘God particle’) validated the Standard Model of physics, which also predicts that about 60% of the time a Higgs boson will decay to a pair of bottom quarks.
• In the 1960s Peter Higgs was the first person to suggest that this particle might exist.
• The Standard Model of particle physics is the theory which describes three of the four known fundamental forces (the electromagnetic, weak, and strong interactions, and not including the gravitational force) in the universe, as well as classifies all known elementary particles.
• Scientists do not yet know how to combine gravity with the Standard Model.
• The Higgs particle is a boson.
• Bosons are thought to be particles which are responsible for all physical forces.
• Other known bosons are the photon, the W and Z bosons, and the gluon.
• It would be almost 50 years before the particle’s existence could be confirmed at the Large Hadron Collider.
• Higgs’ theory relates to how subatomic particles that are the building blocks of matter get their mass.
• This theoretical understanding is a central part of the so-called Standard Model, which describes the physics of how the world is constructed.