Necessary Alterations to the Standard Model After the Discovery of the Higgs Boson Particle

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The Standard Model (SM) describes the fundamental particles of matter and their interaction with one another governed by three of the fundamental forces; electromagnetic, strong and weak. The Higgs boson, proposed fifty years ago by theoretical physicists (Brumfiel, 2012), is the fundamental particle responsible for mass and is an essential component of the Standard Model. Furthermore, it’s the only particle of the SM that has not yet been observed. In 2012 a particle consistent with the Standard Model Higgs boson, of mass around 125GeV (Aad et al. 2012), was observed at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) with the ATLAS detector, finally completing the Standard Model. This discovery of the Higgs boson is of great importance scientifically in that it completes the Standard Model or encourages physicists to extend the SM and other models. The practical uses, whether it be direct use of the boson itself or the use of processes and technologies employed to discover it, will also be considered. This discovery opens a whole new range of questions and implications for physicists such as the fact that there might be a ‘Higgs family’ rather than just the one Higgs boson predicted in the Standard Model and observed experimentally in 2012. This means that the Standard Model will have to be extended or other theories will have to be considered such as supersymmetry to explain such concepts.
In the Standard Model, particles know as bosons are responsible for mediating force between the fundamental particles; quarks and leptons. Prior to the discovery of the Higgs-like particle using the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider, the Higgs boson was the only particle in the Standard Model that was yet to be discovered. Various measurements that ...

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...such as photons, do not. It also gives a fundamental explanation as to why the universe appears as it does. Without the Higgs, atoms and molecules would not be possible. At the moment there are no practical uses of the Higgs boson due to the fact that the time it exists before decaying is far too small to be able to utilize the particles itself. However, efforts taken in the journey to discover the Higgs boson have contributed to technologies used today such as the World Wide Web and medical advances against cancer. It’s suggested that explanations beyond the Standard Model are needed to explain some of the observations at ATLAS such as the light (125 GeV) mass. Observations that are in need of further explanation open the possibility of new research which could lead to confirmation or declination of theories or possibly even entirely new concepts not yet predicted.

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