The physics world is celebrating this week's announcement of the discovery of the Higgs boson particle, but UNBC physics professor Elie Korkmaz expects more people will rejoice when real-world applications are discovered.
The long-awaited discovery of the particle by researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research laboratory in Switzerland and France completes the standard model physicists use to describe the creation and operation of the universe. The particle, which only existed for a fraction of a second in the accelerator before disintegrating, was the missing piece which explains how other particles gained mass.
Its elusiveness, and it's importance in the creation of the universe, gave it the nickname the God particle.
Korkmaz said the discovery is great for physicists, but in time others will benefit.
"We know that in addition to the intellectual satisfaction we get from this, we know throughout history that always, always an application has come from a discovery," he said. "It may take 50 years to see how you can put this into something useful. Sometimes it takes 100 years and sometimes it takes one year."
Korkmaz likened the discovery to those made in nuclear physics last century. At the time the scientists didn't see an immediate practical use for their research, but the technology eventually developed into numerous medical and energy uses.
Just what the Higgs boson discovery could be used for is anyone's guess, but Korkmaz said it does open the door to further research. The first step, he said, is for scientists to further probe the data they already have on the particle to discover more of its properties.
More experiments will be conducted at the European particle accelerator at even higher energy in the future. At the moment the accelerator is only working at half of its power, but when it's fully powered up, more discoveries -- including different types of Higgs boson particles -- are possible.
"The idea here is that we might find more Higgs bosons, and those won't be the standard model Higgs bosons, they will be truly new physics particles," Korkmaz said. "There are other particles that extensions to the standard model predict should be there. So far we have absolutely no evidence of them."
Korkmaz, who does research in particle physics at labs in Vancouver and Virginia, described the current Higgs boson particle as in the "boring" version, in so much as it behaved as theorists expected it would,
"The boring Higgs boson, which looks like that's the one we've discovered -- which is fine, nobody is disappointed with that discovery -- but people are still hoping to find more particles," he said.
In the meantime the discovery of the particle gives scientists like Korkmaz the piece of mind of knowing the theory they have all been working with is now even more legitimate.
"The (standard model is the) most successful scientific theory ever to be put forward by humans which so far has not been proven wrong at any level by any experiment," he said.
