The particles, known as Higgs Bosons, are predicted to be of central importance in answering key questions about mass. He says Melbourne's School of Physics has developed critical elements for the project, including sensitive detector arrays at the heart of the experiment. Professor Taylor says the search for the Higgs Boson stems from experimental research over the past decade into the Standard Model of particle physics. Test after test finds data consistent with the predictions of the Standard Model. However the model is incomplete.
Many parameters remain unspecified.
They must be determined by measurement. Scottish physicist Peter Higgs showed in the early 1960s that the existence of a particular type of scalar field could break the symmetry of the Standard Model in such a way as to make natural the masses of the fermions and gauge bosons. However, Higgs' concept led to an unavoidable prediction - the existence of a new particle, now called the Higgs Boson. Fortunately, in the Standard Model and its extensions, many of the properties of the Higgs Boson are well prescribed. For a given Higgs Boson mass, the models predict just how they will be produced and how they will decay.