Skip to Content
MIT News magazine

Hunting for Higgs

MIT researchers take part in the world’s biggest physics experiment
October 20, 2008

MIT physics professor Steven Nahn, PhD ‘98, felt “guarded jubilation” on the morning of September 10, when a beam of protons completed the first 27-­kilometer trip around the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland. The huge particle accelerator could help scientists understand some of the biggest mysteries of the physical world.

Ultimately, the LHC will accelerate beams of subatomic particles in opposite directions and smash them into each other. These collisions will produce new particles, which Nahn and his group can detect and analyze by tracking their paths through the magnetic fields of the accelerator’s detectors. They hope that one such particle will be the Higgs boson, which is what many scientists believe endows some of the smallest units of matter with mass. Within three years, “we should be able to say definitively whether the Higgs model is correct or if there is something entirely new,” Nahn says.

In addition to setting the stage for the discovery of new particles, the high-energy collisions will enable scientists to study matter under extreme conditions. By late 2009, they will begin to study collisions between lead nuclei, potentially allowing them to simulate conditions in the universe one-millionth of a second after the Big Bang, says Gunther Roland, an MIT physics professor involved in the research.

Scientists hope to witness the first proton collisions by the end of 2008. “At the very beginning, it will be chaos,” says Nahn. “It will be great.”

Keep Reading

Most Popular

Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.

And that's a problem. Figuring it out is one of the biggest scientific puzzles of our time and a crucial step towards controlling more powerful future models.

OpenAI teases an amazing new generative video model called Sora

The firm is sharing Sora with a small group of safety testers but the rest of us will have to wait to learn more.

Google’s Gemini is now in everything. Here’s how you can try it out.

Gmail, Docs, and more will now come with Gemini baked in. But Europeans will have to wait before they can download the app.

This baby with a head camera helped teach an AI how kids learn language

A neural network trained on the experiences of a single young child managed to learn one of the core components of language: how to match words to the objects they represent.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.