World's most ambitious experiment about to start

[Perfection]

Purpose of the Experiment

The existence of the Higgs boson would be a significant step in the search for a Grand Unified Theory, which seeks to unify three of the four known fundamental forces: electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force, leaving out only gravity. The Higgs boson may also help to explain why gravitation is so weak compared with the other three forces.

Higgs boson may be produced at the LHC. Here, two gluons decay into a top/anti-top pair which then combine to make a neutral Higgs (H0).

When in operation, about seven thousand scientists from eighty countries will have access to the LHC. Physicists hope to use the collider to answer the following questions:

* Is the popular Higgs mechanism for generating elementary particle masses in the Standard Model realised in nature? If so, how many Higgs bosons are there, and what are their masses?

* Will the more precise measurements of the masses of the quarks continue to be mutually consistent within the Standard Model?

* Do particles have supersymmetric ("SUSY") partners?

* Why are there apparent violations of the symmetry between matter and antimatter?

* Are there extra dimensions, as predicted by various models inspired by string theory, and can we "see" them?

* What is the nature of dark matter and dark energy?

* Why is gravity so many orders of magnitude weaker than the other three fundamental forces?

Renowned British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has bet against the mega-experiment finding the elusive Higgs particle. "I think it will be much more exciting if we don't find the Higgs. That will show something is wrong, and we need to think again. I have a bet of $100 that we won't find the Higgs," Hawking speculated, but the experiment could discover superpartners, particles that would be supersymmetric partners to particles already known. "Their existence would be a key confirmation of string theory, and they could make up the mysterious dark matter that holds galaxies together. Whatever the LHC finds, or fails to find, the results will tell us a lot about the structure of the universe," he said.