Indian scientist narrows down search for God Particle

Physicist claims he has made the most precise measurement

Extremely precise measurement of the mass of a sub-atomic particle by an Indian physicist has bolstered the hope of discovering the so-called “God Particle” – the last piece of the missing jigsaw puzzle in the atomic world that scientists need to explain the universe’s grand design.

On Saturday, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in the US announced very accurately measuring the mass of a particle called W Boson. It is the result of almost five years of diligent research by Pune-born Ashutosh Kotwal, a professor of physics at Duke University and his colleagues from the US and Europe who used the Fermilab facility for the measurement.

Precise measurement of that tiny mass narrows down the search for Higgs Boson—popularly known as the God Particle—which is being hunted in a mammoth underground experimental facility called Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe by spending billions of dollars.

“The measurement I have made is the world’s most precise measurement of the mass of the W Boson. It predicts that Higgs boson mass should be 90 GeV. This gives very important guidance to LHC because it means that the search for the Higgs boson must be conducted at lower mass than the range that LHC has investigated so far,” Kotwal told Deccan Herald. Incidentally, bosons are a type of sub-atomic particles, which were named after late Indian physicist S N Bose who predicted their existence years before the actual discovery. In the last two weeks, Kotwal and his colleagues presented the results in  a series of in-house seminars, the laboratory said in a statement.

The new measurement is an important, independent indication of the mass of the theorised Higgs boson. It provides a rigorous test of the Standard Model that serves as the blueprint for our world, detailing the properties of the building blocks of matter and how they interact. Standard model is a physics theory that explains every particle and force of nature. It remains one of the cornerstones of modern physics. While almost all particles described in the theory have been discovered by the scientists so far, the Higgs boson, which imparts mass to all other particles, remains elusive so far.

  Search for the Higgs boson remains one of the most important scientific queries by mankind. Many nations pooled their resources to construct the world’s most expensive experimental facility – the $ 9-billion LHC – to search for Higgs and carrying out other physics research.

“This is the most precise result on W-mass. The more precise you measure W-mass, the more precise would be Higgs measurement,” commented Naba Kumar Mondal from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai who worked in Fermilab in the past.