By David Parry, AP File nbcnews.com
The Higgs boson is sometimes referred to as the “God Particle,” much to the chagrin of scientists who prefer the official name. Its discovery lends strong support to the Standard Model of particle physics, which is thought to govern the basic building blocks of matter. The Higgs boson particle is important to the Standard Model because it signals the existence of the Higgs field, an invisible energy field present throughout the universe that imbues other particles with mass. Since its discovery in 2012, the particle has been making waves in the physics community.
Now that scientists have measured the particle’s mass, they can make many other calculations, including one that seems to point to the end of the universe.
The Higgs boson is about 126 billion electron volts, or about the 126 times the mass of a proton. This turns out to be the precise mass needed to keep the universe on the brink of instability, but physicists say the delicate state will eventually collapse and the universe will become unstable. That conclusion involves the Higgs field.
The Higgs field emerged at the birth of the universe and has acted as its own source of energy since then, Lykken said. Physicists believe the Higgs field may be slowly changing as it tries to find an optimal balance of field strength and the energy required to maintain that strength. [5 Implications of Finding a Higgs Boson Particle.
Right now the Higgs field is in a minimum potential energy state — like a valley in a field of hills and valleys. The huge amount of energy required to change into another state is like chugging up a hill. If the Higgs field makes it over that energy hill, some physicists think the destruction of the universe is waiting on the other side.
But an unlucky quantum fluctuation, or a change in energy, could trigger a process called “quantum tunneling.” Instead of having to climb the energy hill, quantum tunneling would make it possible for the Higgs field to “tunnel” through the hill into the next, even lower-energy valley. This quantum fluctuation could happen somewhere out in the empty vacuum of space between galaxies and create an expanding “bubble,” Lykken said.
Either all of space-time exists on this razor’s edge between a stable and unstable universe, or the calculation is wrong, Lykken said.
If the calculation is wrong, it must come from a fundamental part of physics that scientists have not discovered yet. Lykken said one possibility is the existence of invisible dark matter that physicists believe makes up about 27 percent of the universe. Discovering how dark matter interacts with the rest of the universe could reveal properties and rules physicists don’t know about yet.
The other is the idea of “supersymmetry.” In the Standard Model, every particle has a partner, or its own anti-particle. But supersymmetry is a theory that suggests every particle also has a supersymmetric partner particle. The existence of these other particles would help stabilize the universe, Lykken said.
“We found the Higgs boson, which was a big deal, but we’re still trying to understand what it means and we’re also trying to understand all the other things that go along with it,” Lykken said. “This is very much the beginning of the story, and I’ve shown you some directions that story could go in, but I think there could be surprises that no one has even thought of.”
— Kelly Dickerson, LiveScience
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