Bulletin No. 2, 2012

After the Higgs, What’s Next? 25 Face-to-face with the God Particle Prof. Chu Ming-chung , professor of physics at CUHK, likened the Higgs field to water. When we walk in water, we feel we are pulled back or weighed down, as if we have been given extra ‘mass’. The Higgs field, suffused with mass or mass-giving particles, is similar to that. But how can we prove that it really exists? Man proposed, but God was not ready to dispose. The Higgs particle remained elusive, which accounted for its other name the ‘God particle’. When the theory came out decades ago, the particle accelerators were not yet powerful enough to set loose the Higgs. But the arrival of the much more powerful Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in the later part of the 2000s changed all that. The LHC at the European Organization for Nuclear Research ( Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire , CERN) in Geneva, 26.5 km in circumference and 90 m deep in the ground, can smash protons at 99.9999991% of the speed of light, thereby producing fireballs with effervescent particles such as the Higgs and leaving traces which can prove their existence. For some months since the beginning of 2012, the scientific community had been holding its breath in anticipation of the tracking and proving of the existence of the God particle. Then in July, the research teams at CERN announced that they had found a Higgs-like particle. The whole world erupted in euphoria. But a lot remains to be done. Upper: LHC tunnel Lower: Installation of the CMS silicon tracking system ©CERN ©CERN Prof. Chu Ming-chung