What is Higgs Boson? Why is Large Hadron Collider important?« Back to Questions List

We have often come across the term Higgs Boson, In the recent past. The discovery of Higgs Boson is one of the most import discoveries in Physics.

A boson is a kind of particle that is even smaller than an atom. It took more than 50 years of relentless efforts to prove that they really exist.

Mass in physics is a measure of how much stuff an object (a particle, a molecule or a box) contains. Mass holds fundamental particles in place. If not for mass, the fundamental particles that make atom would whiz around the universe at the speed of light. Thus the universe could not have been clumped up into matter or in the present form.

Higgs mechanism proposes that there is a field of bosons in the universe and this field is termed Higgs field. Interaction of particles with this field, and with Higgs bosons in it, results in formation of mass. The Higgs boson is named after Peter Higgs, one of six physicists who, in 1964, proposed the mechanism that suggested the existence of such a particle.

Large Hadron Collider was the equipment that  proved the existence of Higgs boson. It is a circular tunnel of 27 kilometers in circumference. It is situated under Swiss-French border. It was built by European Organisation of Nuclear Research or CERN, to test the predictions of different theory of particle physics. On July 4^th, 2012, CERN announced the discovery of a new subatomic particle greatly resembling the Higgs boson. It is one of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time. 

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