Higgs boson

Where does the mass of elementary particles?

Atlas and CMS detectors for the LHC produced a few months of 2012, more collisions than throughout 2011.
But the Higgs boson, the "God particle" as some call it, has not been observed. On Wednesday, July 4, 2012, was held in Australia the 36th International Conference on High Energy Physics, a research conference of the Higgs boson.
Exciting few sentences but still no Higgs boson. Sergio Bertolucci (director of research at CERN): "It's hard not to get excited. We said last year that in 2012, we would find a new particle like the Higgs boson, or we would exclude the existence of the standard model Higgs. With all the appropriate caution, we are, I think, at a crossroads: the observation of this new particle shows us the way forward in the future to better understand what we observe in the data." Rolf Heuer (CERN Director General): "We have taken another step in our understanding of nature. The discovery of a particle whose characteristics are compatible with those of the Higgs boson opens the way for further studies, requiring more statistics, which will establish the properties of the new particle, it should also lift the veil of other mysteries of our universe."

Some collisions at the LHC may indirectly reveal the Higgs boson, physicists hope that this new era of their physics provides new data on the functioning of the universe.
To understand the fundamental laws of Nature, physicists rely on the standard model that describes remarkably particle physics.
This model predicts the existence of a particle called the Higgs boson, whose detection is one of the priority goals of the LHC.
The Higgs boson is a particle predicted by the famous "standard model" of elementary particle physics and is the missing link of this model.
Indeed, this particle is supposed to explain the origin of mass of all particles of the Universe (including itself), but despite this fundamental role, it remains to be discovered since no experiment has observed so far beyond any doubt.

NB: The nuclei of atoms consist of protons and neutrons. Around these nuclei, electrons revolve. These three components (protons, neutrons and electrons) are virtually all matter.

Video: John Ellis, a theoretical physicist, explained by an analogy to the Higgs fields and how does one search for the Higgs boson. © CernTV, YouTube

Standard model

Today the Standard Model describes successfully three of the four fundamental interactions: strong, weak and electromagnetic. The Standard Model does not describe the fourth interaction: the gravitational interaction.

The three families of elementary particles:
- The up and down quarks, and leptons, electrons and electron neutrinos,
- The charm and strange quarks, leptons and muon and muon neutrino,
- Top and bottom quarks and tau leptons and tau neutrino. Four of these elementary particles would be sufficient in principle to construct the world around us: the up and down quarks, the electron and the electron neutrino. Others are unstable and decay to join these four particles.

Image: The table of elementary particles of the Standard Model, classifies fermions, constituents of matter and bosons.