Researchers found evidence that the Higgs boson, a fundamental particle, is responsible for giving mass to elementary particles.
"In nature, there are two types of particles: fermions and bosons," Ketino "Keti" Kaadze, a research associate at Fermilab who will be joining the faculty at Kansas State University's physics department, said in a news release. "Fermions, quarks and leptons make up all the matter around us. Bosons are responsible for mediating interaction between the elementary particles."
A research team looked at the same data that was used to show the existence of the Higgs boson to show they decay into fermions.This phenomenon was predicted in 1964, but was not observed until the Higgs boson was identified in 2012. The finding helps researchers gain a better understanding of how the universe works.
"We think that the Higgs boson is responsible for the generation of mass of fundamental particles," Kaadze said. "For example, the electrons acquire their mass by interacting with the Higgs boson. As electrons are not massless, they form stable orbits around nuclei, thus allowing the formation of electrically neutral matter from which the Earth and all of us are made. Even slight changes of the masses of fundamental particles around us would change the universe very drastically, and the Higgs boson is the centerpiece that ties it all together."
The team looked for Higgs boson decaying to tau leptons (fermions that are very heavy equivalents of electrons) and heavy fermions called beauty quarks. The Higgs boson was the last key component needed to confirm the Standard Model of particle physics; which ecplains how the unverse work at small length scales. Researchers plan to double the center-of-mass energy at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) which will allow them to create Higgs bosons.
"We know that the Standard Model of physics that we have now does not explain some puzzles in nature," Kaadze said. "We know there has to be other models that can explain phenomena like dark matter and dark energy, and why we can have different generations of the same particle that are identical except for their mass. Finding the Higgs particle wasn't the end of the story. It was the starting point on a new horizon."
