A relative of the Higgs Boson,
one that inspired the long hunt for the Higgs Boson in the first place, has
been observed properly for the first time.
The Higgs Boson itself was first
proposed to exist in the 1960s, and only appeared in the Large Hadron Collider
in Geneva in 2012, 50 years later. Peter Higgs and François Englert
theorised the existence of the particle, and received the Nobel Physics prize
for their hard work and dedication in 2013.However their ideas were actually inspired by how photons (Particles of Light) behave in superconductors. Metals, when dropped to an extremely low temperature (around -234 Degrees Celsius), allow electrons to move around them with little to no resistance. This produces a lot of extremely cool effects, for example the Meissner effect, which allows a magnet to levitate above a superconducting surface.
However, when the metal reaches around zero degrees kelvin (Absolute Zero, which is the lowest temperature that can possibly be reached) , vibrations are made in the superconducting metal, which in turn slow down photons, making light act as if it has a mass.
This effect is linked
very closely to the Higgs Boson, and Ryo Shimano at the University of Tokio who
led the team making the new discovery has said that they are the Mathematical
equivalent of Higgs particles.
In order to find this
new effect, Shimano and his team shook the superconductor with a beam of light,
which is a similar method to how particle physicists created the actual Higgs
Boson in the Hadron Collider in the first place.
This could prove to be
an amazing discovery in physics as by comparing the similarities between the
Hadron Collider and the absolute zero superconductor could prove to be very
useful in studying the actual Higgs Boson. This is because "One can really do the experiments in a table-top
manner, which would definitely reveal new physics and hopefully provide some
useful feedbacks to particle physics." Shimano has said.
