We have a Higgs Boson snapshot, not complete picture: IISc scientist

For Prof Rohini Godbole of the Centre for High Energy Physics, Indian Institute of Science, the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle was special as she was present at CERN European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva, delivering a series of lectures at its summer school. One of the top scientists in the field as well as a frequent visitor to CERN, Godbole elaborates what Higgs Boson really means and why it had generated excitement in the cafeterias of CERN.

Why should ordinary people care at all?
Even before particle physicists, people have asked the question - what is everything made up of? How we all are made up of? It’s not enough to just say that electrons and nucleus make an atom, we should also be able to say why they are sticking together and not breaking apart.

Finding the Higgs Boson in some sense is the last bit of that answer of how things are put together. It’s the final piece of puzzle in the bricks and mortars of nature. This was one piece that was missing from our understanding of the building blocks of nature.
Physicists have already discovered many fundamental Bosons and Fermions. What they hadn’t discovered till now was the Spin Zero Boson, which we had predicted existed. This is something we had understood about the Standard Model. Actually right now we have not proved that the particle is Spin Zero. Right now all we have are indications that there is a Boson. What is the spin of this Boson is something we don’t know, but we know that it is not a Spin One Boson. So, we are beginning to think that we may have our guy.

Until now we only had footprints of the Higgs Boson and no proof. Now we have a snapshot of the particle, but it is still hazy. There is a lot more work that needs to be done.  If the Higgs Boson particle had not been found, we would be back to the drawing board so to speak. We would have had to have revised our notions and begin afresh.

Beyond standard model
Before we could think about physics beyond the Standard Model, we had to find the last piece of the Standard Model. Now we are trying to see if there are small differences in the Higgs Boson particle. In fact we are hoping for this, because the failure of the Higgs Boson to be exactly as it was predicted will end up giving us directions and implications of physics beyond standard model.
We don’t know if there is only one Higgs Boson. We don’t know yet. There are theories that there could be more Higgs Bosons and some theories predict that the Higgs Boson’s properties would be different. Now our job is to see if this is the Higgs Boson described by the Standard Model.

The make-up of the Universe
This is where one needs to appreciate the strength of the Standard Model of particle physics. An experiment that someone does in a lab at the distance scale of an atom or nuclei actually tells us how energy is generated in Sun. Probing the laws of nature at a distance scale of 1 Fermi is actually like studying something at one millionth of a centimetre. The laws of physics that are operating inside a nucleus that are studied in a lab are found to be true at cosmological distances as well.

The misconceptions
I wish people would stop calling it the God’s Particle. It’s a very important particle and thousands of particle physicists have been searching for it and it’s a particle whose existence proves that the humanity’s understanding of the basic laws was correct. So, in a sense this should concern all of humanity. But it has nothing to do with it being God’s Particle.

Being at CERN
It was absolutely fantastic. I have been going to CERN a lot in the last few years to teach at the summer school or for workshops and conferences and interacted quite a bit with experimental physicists as well. I reached CERN on June 14 and there were already rumours that something big was going to happen. We would speculate in the cafeteria about what it could be and when the announcement would take place. On the day of the announcement, my lecture series was supposed to begin in the morning, but was pushed off to the afternoon for obvious reasons. The atmosphere was just electric.