The Higgs boson is the fundamental particle associated with the Higgs field, which is responsible for the mass of other fundamental particles such as electrons and quarks. When a particle encounters a force, its mass determines how much it resists changing its speed or position. All fundamental particles do not have mass. The photon, which is a light particle that carries the electromagnetic force, has no mass.
The world’s most powerful particle accelerator is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) built the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in the same 27-km (17-mile) tunnel that housed the Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP). The circular tunnel is located 50-175 meters (165-575 feet) below ground on the French-Swiss border. On September 10, 2008, the LHC conducted its first test run.
We need to accumulate more data to see how this evolves. To produce the rare boson triplets, scientists smashed protons together at the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, near Geneva. W bosons are particles that transmit the weak force, which is responsible for certain types of radioactive decay.
Andreas Hoecker
On September 18, an electrical problem in a cooling system caused a temperature increase of about 100 degrees Celsius (180 degrees Fahrenheit) in the magnets, which are designed to operate at temperatures close to absolute zero (273.15 degrees Celsius, or 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit). Early predictions that the LHC would be repaired quickly turned out to be overly optimistic.
Around 270 WWW events, trios of particles called W bosons, appeared in an experiment at the world’s largest particle collider, researchers report in the Physical Review Letters. By measuring how often W boson triplets appear in such experiments, physicists can check their foundational theory of particle physics — the standard model — for any cracks.
To produce the rare boson triplets, scientists smashed protons together at the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, near Geneva. W bosons are particles that transmit the weak force, which is responsible for certain types of radioactive decay. The particles are mysterious: In April, researchers with the now-concluded CDF experiment at Fermilab in Batavia, Ill., reported that the W boson was more massive than predicted, hinting that something may be amiss with the standard model.
In the new study, the probability of a WWW appearance was slightly higher than predicted by the standard model, the team found, though not enough for scientists to declare the theory flawed. “We need to accumulate more data to see how this evolves,” says ATLAS spokesperson and physicist Andreas Hoecker of CERN, the particle physics lab that is the home of the LHC.
Those proton collisions, which reached an energy of 13 trillion electron volts, occurred before the LHC shut down for upgrades in 2018. In July, the LHC restarted at a higher energy of 13.6 trillion electron volts. New data could help nail down whether these threes of a kind really do misbehave.
