A finding with the Higgs boson confirms the Standard Model

The 4th of July 2012 is remembered as a milestone in science, as it is the moment in which the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, through a colossal experiment at the LHC ( the large hadron collider).

Now, the ATLAS experiment has informed about a preliminary result that has excited the scientific community: the confirmation of a prediction of the Standard Model of particle physics, through an experiment that has again implicated the Higgs boson, unfortunately nicknamed "the God particle". The Standard Model is a set of postulates that was developed in the sixties and is used, by the way, to understand how the quantum world works (particles such as protons and electrons).

The study was presented on July 9, 2018 during the 2018 International Conference of High Energy Physics (ICHEP) in Seoul (South Korea).

What this new discovery indicates is that the Higgs field, which 'gives' mass to the particles, can also be used to provide mass to charged fermions (quarks and leptons) through interactions between atoms, with a force proportional to the mass of the particle.

Let's explain this more carefully.

The test, also performed at the LHC, collided two protons to create a superior pair of quark-top antiquark and a Higss boson decomposing into pairs of quarks b. The proton-proton collision produced a mass equivalent to 500 protons: the heavier the particle, the more it interacts with the Higgs field.

This result is the verification of a prediction that the Standard Model made at the time, and that is now confirmed: the Higgs coupling constant, a property that is attributed to the Higgs boson, is proportional to the mass of the particles with which interacts; that is, as we have explained above, the heavier the particle, the more it will interact with the Higgs field.

For six years, since the discovery of the Higgs boson, the ATLAS experiment at CERN has observed approximately 30 percent of the Higgs boson decompositions predicted in the Standard Model. However, the other 60 percent had not yet been observed, which corresponds to the Higgs boson breaking down into pairs of quarks b.

Today, finally, scientists have made this observation, which had remained elusive until now, and confirming the predictions of the Standard Model of particle physics, giving more strength and rotundity to a theory that has been applied since the sixties.