They notified the director general of CERN and drafted a paper — never published — describing the discovery. And then the signal faded like an old tied balloon. The biggest false alarm, one that went around the world, came from Atlas. She was one of a handful of scientists who thought they were seeing the evidence of the Higgs back in in data from an earlier CERN collider called LEP. In the spring of , Dr. Wu thought she had found the Higgs again.
A cheerful and controlling presence, partial to wearing red, Dr. Wu thinks of herself as a mother to the 47 former students and postdoctoral fellows whose portraits line the hallway outside her CERN office. As a young postdoc at M. When the collider was restarted, they had hit the ground running. By Easter , they had detected a telltale excess of gamma rays, pointing to the same Higgs she and others had thought they were discovering 10 years earlier.
Even more provocatively, Dr. Bedlam ensued in the physics world. Sharma and hundreds of other physicists abandoned their families and canceled vacations to go back to CERN. The aftermath, when the signal turned out to be another fluke, was brutal. It was suggested that whoever was responsible for leaking the report should leave the Atlas collaboration.
Many physicists, Dr. Wu admits, thought that she herself had leaked the report. A year and a half later, she still found it hard to talk about the Easter event. Wu recalled. She wrote the note as a way of alerting the Atlas community, she said.
For Dr. Gianotti, the incident was a lesson in the need for keeping your mouth shut, helping to cement her distrust of bloggers. For CMS, the incident served as what Dr. Once you are under attack, you start to focus. Thus tested, both collaborations began drinking from a fire hose of data as the collider kept racking up collisions by the hundreds of trillions.
In the early summer of , both Atlas and CMS began recording a surplus of W bosons, particles that carry the so-called weak nuclear force that drives radioactive decay.
That was another telltale sign of the Higgs. On the eve of a big conference in Grenoble, France, Dr. Sharma said. The results were reported at the Grenoble conference with great hoopla. But by the next big conference a month later, in Mumbai, India, the bump was gone.
Physicists already knew by the time the CERN collider started up that if the Higgs existed, it would be found in a narrow window of possible masses — equivalent to billion to billion electron volts of energy.
Their task was to sort through that window, looking for the telltale excess, or bump, like a sports fan scanning the radio dial in his car looking for the Yankees broadcast. By the fall of , most of that window had been ruled out, and physicists worried that the whole window might be closed by the end of the year, meaning that the Higgs, or at least the simplest version predicted by the theorists, did not exist — and sending theorists back to their blackboards in search of a better understanding of our origins.
Paradoxically, many physicists, including Dr. The Higgs boson fit like a key into a lock into the Standard Model, a suite of equations that was a battle-tested explanation of most of the forces of nature. But physics, Dr.
Sharma explained, advances on surprises. Tonelli, however, it was a dark time. In the fall, there was a changing of the guard in Atlas. Murray as co-convenor of the Higgs search, filling in for a colleague who was going on maternity leave. Gross had followed an unlikely route to this mission. He dropped everything and went back to Israel, studied string theory at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and then moved on to experimental work, all the while trying to keep up his music career.
He had been applying for the Higgs job in Atlas for years, and had given up until he got a call one day. When it finally happened for him, Dr. Gross recalled expressing some trepidation about his new role. Murray told him not to worry, he was going to have the time of his life. While physicists fretted about the death of the Higgs, something was happening out in the wilds of uncertainty. But another was blooming like the shy girl at a dance.
In retrospect, nobody could remember exactly when she had come in. But she was the one who would marry the prince. The bump may have appeared as early as May. It was then, Dr. By comparison, a proton, the building block of the atomic nucleus, is about a billion electron volts.
The bump corresponded to a single particle, a flake of hypothetical energy, that weighed as much as an atom of iodine.
The bump persisted, rising and falling as data from more collisions and more channels were added, and kept being dismissed. Gianotti recalled being shown the bump during a meeting. Gross had a markedly different reaction. After a wine-soaked meal and some grappa, he fell asleep on the couch.
While he slept, a new data analysis came in from CERN. They asked him if he wanted to see the Higgs boson. Gross jumped up. As he described it later in a blog post , they were all in a state of shock. The bump was too big to ignore anymore. On the other side of the wall of mostly silence between the teams, a signal was also oozing into view.
Tonelli, of CMS, saw it first on Nov. He was making his rounds, talking to his young recruits. That was one of the signature ways that a Higgs boson would dissolve. That afternoon he met with a second group in the cafeteria. One of them opened a laptop and showed him a bump in the gamma-gamma channel, the other big Higgs decay channel.
It was almost 3-sigma and was at the same energy as the morning bump, about billion electron volts. I considered it a sort of gift. The following week, at a meeting in Paris, some people were still talking about the death of the Higgs. Tonelli was one of the few people in the world who knew differently.
Sharma, of CMS, went home for Thanksgiving and a long-awaited reunion with his family. In his pocket as he ate was a new plot combining the results from both channels, a new bump indicating a Higgs boson at billion electron volts. A neighbor pestered him with questions about the search, but Dr. A year earlier, many of his colleagues had been ready to write off the Higgs boson, and with it the Standard Model.
That is all I need. Afterward he marveled at how attitudes toward physics had changed from a few years earlier, when some people feared the new collider would destroy Earth.
Gianotti and Dr. It was apparent from the outset that nature had dealt Atlas the stronger hand, at least for the first round. Murray, of Atlas, felt both reassured and relieved. According to Atlas, the new particle had a mass of billion electron volts; according to CMS, it was billion. Neither experiment was even close to having the statistical goods — a 5-sigma level of significance — to declare a discovery. But the fact that two separate experiments were hinting at roughly the same answer was encouraging, and worth telling the world about.
CERN scheduled a special seminar on Dec. Gianotti, speaking through the pain of a toothache and dental surgery to an overflow crowd at CERN and physics fans everywhere clustered around Webcasts, went first. It would also take a lot more data to confirm what was still at best a promising hint, with a 1-in chance of being a fluke.
The results put the focus on the next big meeting, the International Conference on High Energy Physics, scheduled for July 4 in Melbourne, Australia, by which time the amount of data from the collider would have doubled. At the very least it would be an interesting progress report to see if the bumps were still there.
Tonelli made no bones about his belief that this was the Higgs at long last. He told Dr. Englert, a founder of the Higgs theory, not to book vacation for the beginning of July. But the experimentalists had all seen promising bumps and promising reputations staked on them come and go. Spiropulu, the Caltech professor.
And Dr. People have to be prepared for there to be no Higgs. The Mother of Everything. Characteristically, Dr. Gianotti was playing her cards close to the vest. She was less excited about the nearly overlapping bumps, she said, than about the fact that they had now managed to exclude almost the whole mass range that had existed for the Higgs only a year before.
Now there was nowhere left for it to be. So no additional distractions in other mass regions. Somewhere along that time, Dr. Gianotti admitted, she had stopped playing the piano, unable to give it the focus it deserved. In January , Dr. Asked if this was a bittersweet moment to step down, Dr. Tonelli said he had been living a dream. Incandela, a man with a warm, casual demeanor, was not so sure at all that the Higgs had been discovered on the previous watch.
He firmly rejected one idea that was buzzing around the blogosphere — that by combining their results the two collaborations could take a shortcut to the 5-sigma goal. Incandela had wandered into science from the art world. Growing up in Chicago, he studied at its Art Institute, intending to be a sculptor. He got interested in science while studying the chemistry of ceramics, went on to get a Ph.
He brought with him a deeply philosophical and historical viewpoint on the quest to understand nature. It was the first example in history of people wondering about the origin of mass. So measuring its mass, for instance, could tell us whether the universe is stable or not. This is really unbelievable if you think about it. Throughout the universe.
So for me that is a really profound thing about the Higgs. As at CERN, there had been two groups and two detectors who were now combining their data for what would amount to a last hurrah and a what-might-have-been for the Tevatron. The Fermilab physicists had found a broad hump in their data, between billion and billion electron volts — the same general area as the CERN results.
The data were of scant statistical significance, however, having a chance of about 1 in of being a fluke. If there really had been a race, one of the contestants was now out. Back in Switzerland that same month, during a break when the Large Hadron Collider was not running, Dr. Gross took his girlfriend, Talia Levy Tytiun, down into the Atlas cavern.
On June 18, the two experiments stopped recording data in order to get ready for Melbourne. By then they had already collected as many collisions — some trillion — as they had the entire previous year.
The Atlas teams had already begun analyzing the first batch of this data a week before. Gianotti was at a conference at Fermilab when her colleague Dr. Kado sent her a plot of the new data. The gamma rays were still there, and had grown in significance, putting the boson on the verge of reality. A week later, her team looked at another important decay channel, and her enthusiasm deflated.
There was nothing. Gianotti said. At 10 p. Later that night, Dr. Incandela received a plot from the so-called 4-lepton channel, showing a spike at billion electron volts. He later told the writer Ian Sample that his life changed at that moment.
This documentary, even though a work-in-progress, is now nearing completion. Merci has had a privilege of working with some of the top Internet web sites like ivillage. Merci Media, Inc. Vivek Sharma is presently a filmmaker in transition. However, Merci Media, Inc. Sign In. Edit Vivek Sharma. Showing all 4 items. Co-owner of Merci Media, Inc. Labeled by Producer Magazine as one of the most successful boutique film-production Company.
0コメント