Indian scientist Satyendra Nath Bose after whom the God particle is named.
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND: Indian scientific and technological contributions are among the many that keep European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) buzzing. In a ‘quantum’ leap, CERN scientists claimed to have spotted a sub-atomic particle ‘consistent’ with the Higgs boson or ‘God particle,’ believed to be a crucial building block that led to the formation of the universe. The Higgs Boson is a particle that is theoretically the reason why all matter in the universe has mass. Boson is a subatomic particle with integral spin that is governed by the Bose-Einstein statistics.
Bosons include mesons (eg pions and kaons), nuclei of even mass number, and the particles required to embody the fields of quantum field theory (eg, photons and gluons). Bosons differ significantly from a group of subatomic particles known as fermions in that there is no limit to the number that can occupy the same quantum state. This behaviour gives rise, for example, to the remarkable properties of helium-4 when it is cooled to become a superfluid. A millions of electronic chips and hydraulic stands support the tunnel, which is like the ‘biggest fridge in the world.’ The temperature inside the tunnel is as low as a bone freezing -271 degree Celsius. Incidentally, the neutrino travels 11,000 times per second inside the tunnel.
There is an intrinsic Indian connection to what is happening at CERN - Satyendra Nath Bose. It is Bose after whom the sub-atomic particle ‘boson’ is named. The name Higgs Boson came from a British scientist Peter Higgs and Bose. The work done by Bose and Albert Einstein, later added by Higgs, lead to this pioneering day. The experiment had aimed to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang, when the universe is thought to have exploded into existence about 14 billion years ago.
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