Physicist Peter Higgs arrives at a seminar, July 4, 2012 at CERN, where it was announced that a new subatomic particle, said be consistent with the long-sought Higgs boson, had been discovered. (AP)

Last summer, when scientists finally cornered the elusive building block of the universe known as the Higgs boson, they apparently also discovered something else: that the universe’s days might be numbered.

“It may be that the universe we live in is inherently unstable,” said Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. “And at some point, billions of years from now, it’s all going to get wiped out,”

Scientists refer to last year’s discovery as a Higgs boson-like particle, since they’re still working to confirm it really is the elusive particle. The Higgs boson, also called the “God particle”, is believed to give all objects mass. But Lykken says it could also spell doom for the universe.

The Large Hadron Collider/ATLAS at CERN (Photo: CERN)

Lykken shared his conclusions at the 2013 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The scientist has also worked with CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s biggest and most powerful particle accelerator, which helped identify the Higgs boson-like particle.”If you use all the physics that we know now and you do what you think is a straightforward calculation, it’s bad news,” said Lykken, according to the Reuters news agency.

The calculation Lykken refers to requires knowing the mass of the Higgs to within one percent, as well as the precise mass of other related subatomic particles.

According to Lykeen if any changes are made to the parameters of the Standard Model of particle physics, even by just a little bit, that you’ll get a different end of the universe.

A simulated data model of the Higgs boson  (Photo: CERN)

“This calculation tells you that many tens of billions of years from now, there’ll be a catastrophe,” Lykken told Reuters.

The Standard Model of particle physics provides an explanation for sub-nuclear physics and some aspects of cosmology in the earliest moments of the universe. In the standard model, it’s the Higgs boson that gives mass to all particles.

Lykken foresees the Armageddon scenario like this, “A little bubble of what you might think of as an ‘alternative’ universe will appear somewhere and then it will expand out and destroy us.”

He believes the cataclysmic event will take place quite quickly, at the speed of light.

The good news for planet Earth is that the end of the universe won’t occur for billions of years, long after the Sun burns out, an occurence which will destroy Earth long before the universe’s number is up.

Dr. Pierre Savard (Photo: University of Toronto)

Tired, and rushing to meet a looming deadline,  Dr. Pierre Savard and his colleagues didn’t realize what they’d found when they first came across a particle that looked a lot like the long-sought-after Higgs boson.  But it didn’t take long for them to realize their hard work had paid off.

“When we looked at it, we kind of saw it,” Savard says. “It was unbelievable.”

The University of Toronto  professor belongs to ATLAS, one of two teams tasked with finding whether the mystery subatomic particle – which is believed to give all objects mass ­- actually exists.

The team’s excitement about finding the new particle grew when it discovered the second team, CMS, had found virtually the same thing.

“It’s a big thing.  Essentially, it’s as if we discovered a new fundamental force of nature,” Savard says. “So we know about, for instance, electromagnetism, electricity and magnetism. We know about gravity… but now we’ve found something new and it also plays a key role in our current theory for how we understand how matter interacts with particles and forces. It’s a big deal.”

The ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider (Photo: CERN)

Despite helping to find the most sought-after particle in modern science, Savard actually hopes the new discovery is not the Higgs boson.

“Many of us are hoping that it’s not exactly the particle that’s predicted by our theory, that it may be something close,” he says.

Since problems have been found with their current theory, if the mystery particle doesn’t turn out to be Higgs boson, Savard hopes the new particle  offers  hints as to “what’s out there.”

“The ‘Standard Model’ of particle physics explains a lot, but there’s a lot that it does not explain,”  Savard says.

Some  suggest there might be more than one Higgs boson and that the same theories contained within the Standard Model, could also  explain dark matter or dark matter particles.

Dark matter particles are a type of matter which cannot be seen directly but are believed to make up a great part of the total mass in the universe.

Physicist Peter Higgs arrives at a seminar, July 4, at CERN where it was announced that a new subatomic particle, said be consistent with the long-sought Higgs boson, had been discovered. (Photo: AP Photo/Denis Balibouse, Pool)

Even if the find is the Higgs boson, “there are still some big questions out there,” says Dr. Savard.

One problem Savard sees with the Standard Model is that it doesn’t explain the asymmetry between matter and antimatter.

“In our colliders, we produce essentially equal amounts of matter and antimatter but the universe is made up matter and the Standard Model really doesn’t explain why there’s such an asymmetry,” he says.

He’d  also like to see more research devoted to exploring dark matter, which he says is “probably carried by a particle that we don’t’ know about.”

With the mysteries of matter, antimatter and dark matter lurking, Savard says  the Standard Model explains only about a fraction of the universe. That’s why he hopes  new phenomena will be found with the LHC – the world’s largest atom smasher – which would help unlock these many mysteries of the universe.

New boson discovered at CERN 07/04/12 – (Video © 2012 CERN)

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Illustration of two protons beams colliding in the Large Haldron Collider. Experiments similar to this one will be analyzed for Higgs boson particle production. (© 2011 CERN – Atlas collaboration)

Although it was the Fourth of July holiday in the United States, there were plenty of fireworks in Europe, where scientists announced they’d probably found the elusive Higgs boson, a particle believed to give all objects mass.

At  CERN headquarters in Geneva, two independent scientific teams – ATLAS and CMS – announced they’ve observed a new particle in the mass region around 125-126 GeV (gigaelectron volt).

But is this newly-discovered particle actually the previously-unseen Higgs boson first proposed in 1964 by British theoretical physicist Peter Higgs?

Well, they’re pretty sure it is, but can’t say with 100 percent  certainty.

“We observe, in our data, clear signs of a new particle at the level of 5 sigma, in the mass region around 126 GeV,” said ATLAS experiment spokesperson Fabiola Gianotti, “but a little more time is needed to prepare these results for publication.”

Peter Higgs is best known for his theory explaining the origin of mass of elementary particles in general and the Higgs Boson in particular. (Photo: Gert-Martin Greuel via Wikipedia Commons)

CERN describes “Five sigma” as the top end of a scale particle physicists use to describe the certainty of a discovery. One sigma means the results could be random fluctuations in the data, three sigma counts as an observation and a five-sigma result is a discovery.

“This is indeed a new particle. We know it must be a boson and it’s the heaviest boson ever found,” said CMS experiment spokesperson Joe Incandela. “The implications are very significant and it is precisely for this reason that we must be extremely diligent in all of our studies and cross-checks.”

The Higgs boson is believed to play a critical role in physics, as a building block of the universe.

The theoretical subatomic particle should help explain the origins of mass and why matter has mass. It is considered to be a key component of “The Standard Model of particle physics.”

“It’s hard not to get excited by these results,” said Sergio Bertolucci, CERN research director. “We stated last year that in 2012 we would either find a new Higgs-like particle or exclude the existence of the Standard Model Higgs. With all the necessary caution, it looks to me that we are at a branching point: the observation of this new particle indicates the path for the future towards a more detailed understanding of what we’re seeing in the data.”

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN (Photo: CERN)

The results presented this week in Geneva are based on data collected by CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the the world’s largest atom smasher, in 2011 and 2012.  More 2012 LHC data is being processed, so a complete analysis isn’t expected until around the end of July.

Next week, I talk with Dr. Pierre Savard,  an Atlas team member, who will give us an insider’s view of the search for most sought-after particle in modern science.

If you have any questions you’d like to ask Dr. Savard, please let me know through our comments section below.

Speculation is mounting that physicists at the world’s largest atom smasher plan to announce Wednesday that they’ve pretty much found the most sought-after particle in modern science.

Experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe could establish the existence of the Higgs boson, a particle believed to be a building block of the universe. (AP/CERN)

Scientists in Geneva reportedly believe they have enough evidence to confirm the existence of the Higgs boson, an elusive particle believed to give all objects mass.

The discovery could reshuffle our understanding of why matter has mass which, combined with gravity, gives an object its weight.

On Monday, scientists working with the US Department of Energy’s Tevatron collider at the Fermilab in Chicago announced their data  pointed to the existence of the Higgs boson, but stopped short of claiming a discovery.

European scientists might go a step further Wednesday.

According to the Associated Press, researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), say that they have compiled data that show the “footprint and shadow” of the particle, even though it has never actually been glimpsed.

Two independent teams of physicists have been working to prove the Higgs boson exists, and are expected to stop short of announcing they’ve actually found the elusory particle when they make their big announcement on Wednesday.

Rob Roser, who leads the search for the Higgs boson at the Fermilab in Chicago, compared the latest development to finding the fossilized imprint of a dinosaur, telling the Associated Press, “You see the footprints and the shadow of the object, but you don’t actually see it.”

However, while scientists in Geneva might announce the discovery of  an entirely new particle, Nature reports more data is needed to prove whether the new find actually is the long-awaited “God Particle.”

The magazine quotes one member of the team as saying, “Without a doubt, we have a discovery…It is pure elation!”

(Written by Dora Hasan Mekouar, Science World Online Editor)