Carleton’s physics department helped make history in July as part of the international team that confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson particle.
Professors, students and research assistants from Carleton on the ‘ATLAS’ research team at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) used a particle detector to prove the existence of the Higgs boson, according to a Carleton news release.
“It is wonderful to be part of this international scientific experiment and to work with the dedicated research group at Carleton University,” Gerald Oakham, a Carleton physics professor and leader of the school’s ATLAS group, said on the Carleton website.
The Higgs boson is a particle that makes up the Higgs field, which is thought to give mass to other particles in the universe. Its existence had never been confirmed before, and it had been the missing piece of the “standard model” of physics that scientists use to understand the universe, according to Carleton’s website.
Carleton’s ATLAS group members aren’t the only ones making strides in the world of particle physics.
Carleton professor Kevin Graham is part of a team studying the properties of neutrinos, another type of sub-atomic particle scientists still don’t fully understand.
Neutrinos have such little mass they are difficult to measure accurately, Graham said. They are also unaffected by electromagnetic charges, and so are considered a type of dark matter, he said.
Graham said his task is to try to observe the neutrinos in a rare state called neutrinoless double beta decay, in which a virtual neutrino is instantly produced and then absorbed. Measuring this reaction would tell Graham and his team about the mass of several sub-types of neutrinos, he said. It would also challenge a law of physics known as the conservation of lepton number, by creating charged particles without anti-matter particles to offset them.
Perhaps most importantly, observing neutrinoless double beta decay would prove that neutrino particles are both matter and anti-matter, or majorana particles. None of the other fundamental particles known to physicists are majorana particles, and Graham said the information his team gains could eventually help scientists understand more about the nature of the universe and its basic properties.
“Down the road, these new advances in our knowledge of the universe and its properties ends up getting utilized for things that at this point, you can’t necessarily imagine,” he said.
