Large Hadron Collider To Boost Power In Search of Higgs Boson

CERN scientists should be able to confirm whether or not the Higgs boson exists by November, after scientists crank up the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to smash streams of particles together at an intensity of four tera electronvolts (TeV) per beam they announced in a press release.

“By the time the LHC goes into its first long stop at the end of this year, we will either know that a Higgs particle exists or have ruled out the existence of a Standard Model Higgs,” said CERN’s Research Director, Sergio Bertolucci. “Either would be a major advance in our exploration of nature, bringing us closer to understanding how the fundamental particles acquire their mass, and marking the beginning of a new chapter in particle physics."

The Higgs boson is a hypothetical elementary particle, postulated to help explain mass under a set of theories known as the Standard Model of physics. Supersymmetry predicts a partner particle for every particle in the Standard Model. These particles could help deduce the mass of the Higgs boson.

CERN scientists will run the LHC at 4 TeV from March through to November "with no tweaks" to maximise the amount of data produced, said CERN head of communications James Gillies. CERN expects to collect three times as much data as last year, Gillies said, when the maximum collision energy was 3.5 TeV per beam of protons. CERN expects to collect 15 inverse femtobarns' worth of particle collision data. An inverse femtobarn is a standard unit of integrated luminosity, often used to describe the amount of data accumulated by a particle physics experiment.

"If we have that much data, we'll either exclude the whole Higgs range, or have enough data to show something's there," said Gillies.

The LHC has not had any particle beams running through it since early December as part of a planned shutdown. Scientists will resume firing beams through the LHC in March, and run through to November, when there will be a further shutdown for 20 months. CERN plans to restart the LHC at a beam intensity of 7 TeV in late 2014.

In 2011, CERN said it had narrowed the mass range in which Higgs might exist to between 124 and 126 giga electronvolts (GeV).  The collider's schedule foresees beams back in the LHC next month, and running through to November. There will then be a long technical stop of around 20 months, with the LHC restarting close to its full design energy late in 2014 and operating for physics at the new high energy in early 2015.


CERN Press Release