Since the existence of the Higgs was confirmed, the field of particle physics has gone through “a lot of big changes,” says Lipeles. Theorists Peter Higgs and Francois Englert won the 2013 Nobel Prize for their founding role in the experiments. Photographs of the milestone show a Penn flag hanging on the auditorium wall. When ATLAS and CMS experiment leaders announced that the data they’d gathered passed the five sigma threshold, the crowd cheered. “There was a line out the door to get in,” says Lipeles. To announce the discovery, CERN called a meeting in an auditorium at the LHC on July 4, 2012. After years of data collection, the ATLAS experiment finally passed the high bar set by physics for discovery of “five sigma,” meaning that there was only a 1 in 3.5 million chance the observed data was up to chance and not indicative of the Higgs’ existence. The trigger system at ATLAS is what helped LHC physicists uncover the subatomic particles appearing at just the right amount of mass and energy to indicate the existence of the Higgs boson. The device is called a trigger because it automatically detects which images to discard and which to keep, then instantly triggers data storage of those pictures. So, Lipeles helped develop a “trigger” system for the detectors that stored only the most important images, about one in every 100,000. But if ATLAS kept every single picture from their detector, they would be left storing a volume of data equal to eight times the Library of Congress’s collections every second. While the Higgs won’t linger long enough for the physicists to ever detect it directly, they can predict which particles the Higgs will decay into, then look for those specific particles.įellow Penn physicists Brig Williams, Evelyn Thomson, and Joseph Kroll led the development of certain electronic components in ATLAS’ detector, a device similar to a camera that takes millions of subatomic snapshots every second. The LHC works by colliding subatomic particles at nearly the speed of light in hopes of creating a Higgs boson. That’s where the LHC-and physicists like Lipeles-came in. So physicists needed to detect traces of the Higgs without ever actually seeing it. Lipeles and colleagues are moving into new research directions, including exploring how the Higgs might interact with dark matter. The 25-meter-tall and 46-meter-long ATLAS detector, which identified the Higgs boson, is attached to the Large Hadron Collider. Instead, they decay into smaller, lighter particles, such as photons. Lipeles says the Higgs boson “was actually particularly difficult to find.” That’s because it is heavier than other subatomic particles, and heavy subatomic particles don’t tend to stick around for long. Theoretical physicists proposed the existence of the Higgs boson in 1964, but it took decades for experimental research to catch up. While the role of the Higgs is complex, “the first thing people usually say is that it gives particles mass,” Lipeles says. The Higgs boson, also called the Higgs particle, is key to the Standard Model of physics, which describes a framework for how fundamental forces and subatomic particles form the universe. ![]() The two experiments utilized different equipment and data analysis methods, but both were on the hunt for the Higgs boson together. Because each project partners with different institutions, he switched to the ATLAS experiment after joining Penn’s physics department. He joined an LHC project known as the ATLAS experiment in 2009, right as the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) began collecting data to confirm the existence of the Higgs boson, physics’ most elusive particle yet.īefore that, Lipeles worked at the competing LHC experiment, CMS, just a few miles over the French border. Lipeles is a particle physicist whose work has taken him to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest and most powerful particle collider that spans the border between France and Switzerland. But if you asked the same question to Elliot Lipeles, associate professor of physics in the School of Arts & Sciences, he might have another reason: July 4th, 2022, was the 10th anniversary of the discovery of the Higgs boson. If you asked the average Pennsylvanian why they were celebrating the 4th of July this year, they would probably tell you that it was to mark Independence Day.
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