Before Yesterday...

THE ORIGIN OF MASS:

The origin of mass is the one of the greatest mystery of science.

What exactly is mass?

May it seems like simple question?

But knowing the answer will provide us much more complete understanding of how the universe works. To get these answers we must go back to the very beginning of the Big Bang.

In the first few moment after the Big Bang,  four forces of nature were all indistinguishable and huge inflationary expansion took place increasing the size of universe to unimaginable proportions.

In this extremely hot conditions the fundamental particles begin the form with around the speed of light. Only small fractions of second latter some these particles require the mass and allowed the formation of the universe we know up today.

THE STANDARD MODEL:

The Standard model of elementary particles make up the known universe. They divided into groups called Leptons, Quarks and Gauge bosons.

The leptons consist of the atomic electron and its two larger cousins the Muon, and the Tau and as well as three types of neutrino. The quark group consists of Up and Down quarks which make up constitution of Protons and Neutrons as well as their larger cousins the Charm, Strange, Top and Bottom quarks. The Gauge bosons consist of carrier particles for the three of fundamental forces of nature. This includes Photon, Gluon and W and Z bosons.

Finally we come to the yet undiscovered Higgs boson. According to standard model, all the elementary particles should be massless.

The FACT is here how these particles attain the mass is called Higgs mechanism.

HIGGS MECHANISM:

Here is the simple demonstration of how the Higgs mechanism functions. It states there is the scalar Higgs field which permeates all particles of universe. The particles with no mass such as the photon do not interact with the Higgs field at all. Maintaining their kinetic energy and passing through at the speed of light. The particle with mass such as quark interacts with Higgs field which slows it down and converges some of its kinetic energy until we know of its mass. In order to proof this presence of the Higgs field, Higgs boson must be created and detected. This however has been proven to be a difficult task as the Higgs boson is predicted to be a massive particle requiring huge amounts of energy to produce.

THE ATLAS DETECTORS:

The Atlas detectors are tool of detecting the Higgs. It is in CERN in Geneva, Switzerland and we use to detect high energy collisions produced by LHC. The length is 44m long, 25m diameter weight is 7000tonns. Two beams of protons will be accelerated in opposite directions close to speed of light, collided at center of Atlas. How do you create massive particles such as Higgs from the only two small protons? This comes down to Einstein's famous equation, E=mc^2 which tells us the mass is the just another form of the energy like speeding up protons they require additional kinetic energy. The protons at the LHC are accelerated to 99.999999% speed of light and require total energy of 7TeV. This combines with energy of the other proton traveling in the other direction produces collision with the energy of 14TeV. Upon the collision all this energy becomes hundreds of different kinds of particles. It is at least conditions which it is exit Higgs boson will be created by LHC and detected by Atlas.

Finding the Higgs revolutionize understanding of origin of mass help lead us to unrevealing the other great mysteries of the universe.

 By Gansukh TG.