James Gillies told Reuters the long-sought but elusive Higgs Boson particle could well appear during the extended experiment after the world’s biggest and most expensive scientific machine is turned on again later this month. “If it is there, we have a reasonable chance of seeing it,” said Gillies, referring to the particle which Scots physicist Peter Higgs said three decades ago would explain how matter came together and created the universe and everything in it. Gillies said the 18-24 month operation of the machine, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research on the Swiss-French border near Geneva, would produce a huge amount of information.
Even if the Higgs Boson was not revealed, it would not mean that it did not exist. After the first long run and a year’s break for preparations, the LHC would be turned on again at the highest possible energy level.
“It may be that we require that intensity to capture it,” Gilles added. The LHC was first turned on in September 2008 but had to be shut down after a huge explosion in the 27-kilometer (16.78 mile) circular tunnel through which it runs deep underground. The focus of the LHC is the collision of particles moving in opposite directions at high energy. The billions of collisions, each creating conditions that existed a minute fraction of a second after the “Big Bang” when the universe began 13.7 billion years ago, will produce data that some 10,000 scientists at CERN and around the world will record and analyse. The matter spewed out by the primeval explosion eventually produced the stars, planets and life on Earth -- but the Higgs theory says this was only possible if something like the Boson brought matter together, giving it mass.
The LHC ran for some two months at the end of last year, staging particle beam collisions in the tunnel at an energy up to 2.36 tera-electron volts (TeV), the highest ever achieved.
