Higgs Bison exisitence confirmed at Fota

Bison calf at Fota this week

A baby bison at Fota Wildlife Park in Ireland has been named 'Higgs', in honour (apparently) of Peter Higgs, the scientist who correctly, it now turns out, predicted the existence of a new particle - the Higgs boson.

The Higgs Bison was named after a public appeal for help in naming the calf by the park. The birth of the calf came in the same week that the calf's father Boris, the dominant male in the Fota group, died.

Willy Duffy head warden at Fota Wildlife Park said “it is great to see a calf born just as the summer is about to begin but it is also sad to be losing Boris as he has been with us since we introduced the herd of Bison in 1999”.

The baby bison is the 16th offspring from Boris which included 3 calves that were introduced into Komaneza Forest in Poland in 2008 as part of a reintroduction programme into the wild.

The Park has been part of a European-wide breeding programme ever since Bison first arrived in Cork in 1999. A significant number of calves have been born in the years since and many have been sent overseas to aid in programmes being developed elsewhere.

After a week of polling on the park's Facebook page, the animal was named alongside two other bison - now named Tyson and Bressie.

The news garnered some really positive reaction online after I tweeted about it:

The guys at @fotawildlife have named their new baby bison 'Higgs' which is just the greatest thing I've ever heard! #HiggsBison
— Eoin Lettice (@blogscience) May 25, 2013

95% of people won't get it, the other 5% will ask if the baby bison is hard to find. #HiggsBison
— Elizabeth Evans (@EClaireEvans) May 27, 2013

Well played @fotawildlife well played. But why hasn't #HiggsBison got a twitter account yet?
— Ed Franklin (@EJ_Franklin) May 27, 2013

Well played @fotawildlife well played. But why hasn't #HiggsBison got a twitter account yet?
— Ed Franklin (@EJ_Franklin) May 27, 2013

So @fotawildlife have named their baby bison 'Higgs'. You win, zookeeper people. You win. #HiggsBison
— Mike Agg (@Gammidgy) May 26, 2013

People are loving that we named our Bison "Higgs Bison" plus he has two half brothers called Bressie and Tyson #FWP30
— Fota Wildlife Park (@fotawildlife) May 26, 2013

Still confused about the Higgs Boson?

This may or may not help:


The CERN choir, live in CERN control centre.

Closer and closer to the Higgs boson

Could this image tell of the elusive Higgs boson?

Scientists have announced that they are tantalisingly close to proving or disproving the existence of one of the fundamental building blocks of the Universe.

Although theoretical physicists have already predicted the existence of the so-called Higgs boson, it has never been observed in experiments - up until now, perhaps.

The Higgs boson is thought to be what gives everything else in the Universe mass and was proposed by a group of scientists, including Peter Higgs, back in 1964. Without the Higgs boson and the 'Higgs Field' which is part of this theoretical model, all the material in the Universe would just be whizzing around at light speed and not clumping together to give us planets, particles, puppies and people. We must have mass for 'stuff' to exist in the Universe as we know it and the theory goes, we must have the Higgs boson to give us that mass.

The Large Hadron Collider is the latest device designed to enable experiments to be conducted which may allow physicists to observe the Higgs boson or to exclude it and to say such a thing does not exist. 

The LHC, is located in a circular tunnel 100 metres beneath the Swiss/French border at Geneva. As its name suggests, it is large (weighing 38,000 tonnes and running in a 27 km loop) and it a collider of hadrons. Hadrons are atomic particles of which a proton is just one example. The protons have a positive charge and can therefore be 'steered' around the LHC using magnetic fields. Once they are moving fast enough, the streams of protons whizzing in either direction can be crossed leading to a collision.

With that highly powerful collision, comes a big shower of debris - particles which are only created at such high energies and the physicists at CERN hope to be able to spot the remnants of the Higgs boson in the aftermath of that collision. It is highly unlikely that the Higgs boson will ever be spotted itself, but it's hoped that as the Higgs particle decays into other particles very quickly, it will leave a tell-tale signature that can be spotted.

The scene at today's announcement

In today's announcement, the scientists were keen to emphasise that while their results are based on lots of data, they are not sufficient to allow them to categorically say one way or the other whether the Higgs boson is a reality. If it does exist, the scientists have now reduced the window in which it will detected.

Through repeated experiments, the physicists have detected some "interesting" results when they looked at the remnants of collisions in the 124-126 GeV (gigaelectronvolts) region. One of the scientists, Fabiola Gianotti said of these discoveries, "This excess may be due to a fluctuation, but it could also be something more interesting. We cannot conclude anything at this stage. We need more study and more data. Given the outstanding performance of the LHC this year, we will not need to wait long for enough data and can look forward to resolving this puzzle in 2012."

Over the coming months, scientists at CERN will continue to focus in on this window, which is getting smaller and smaller, in the hope that they can prove one way or the other, the existence of the Higgs. In many ways today's announcement will be a bit of a disappointment for some observers who expected to hear more definitive news. However, if the news coming from Geneva is anything to go by, it will not be long before we know for sure whether this theoretical particle is the real thing.

This post also appears on the Cork Independent Blog.

Trials and Tribulations of a Large Hadron Collider

After a 14 month wait, the boys and girls beneath the Swiss-French border are finally smashing protons together again.

As you'll recall, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was started up by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) just over a year ago to much excitement and some trepidation.

Amidst scares of blackholes and massive explosions, the scientists circulated the first beam of protons all around the 27km-long machine on 10th September 2008.

However, just nine days after start-up, the grand experiment ground to a halt due to a serious fault in two of the massive magnets that bends the beam of protons around the circular collider.

In order to allow repairs to be completed, the temperature in part of the LHC needed to be increased to allow access from its operating temperature of -271 degrees Celsius. Thats colder than deep space!

From the outset of these problems, the scientists at the LHC were pragmatic to say the least.

"If you keep an eye on the big picture, we've been building the machine for 20 years. The switch-on was always going to be a long process," James Gillies, Cern's director of communications, told BBC News at the time.

"A year or two down the line, this moment will be a distant memory, and we'll be running smoothly."

Described as the largest machine in the world and the most powerful physics experiment ever built, the LHC is designed to recreate the unique conditions that existed in the universe a few moments after the infamous Big Bang.

As two beams of protons are accelerated in opposite directions around a circular loop, powerful magnets ensure that they come close to the speed of light and bend safely around the loop.

At a few points around the collider, the proton beams cross and smash into one another releasing massive amounts of energy. Mimicking the energy released at the Big Bang, the scientists hope to achieve new insights into the birth of the universe and the nature of all matter within it.

The repairs completed this week mean that CERN can safely pass low energy beams through the LHC without incident. It will be early 2010 before the energy of the beams have been increased to levels that will allow collisions to be restarted.

It was a close thing. As recently as this month, the restart was in some doubt when a wayward seagull dropped a piece of bread on to an external part of the accelerator causing significant overheating. Since the beam was not operational, no serious damage was done. If the beam had been travelling through the system, automatic failsafes would have kicked in to shut down the machine.

Careless birdlife wasn't the only thing that had the LHC in the news during its 14-month hiatus.

At the end of October, French and Swiss police began investigating a French physicist who worked at the site with suspected links to al-Qaida. The unidentified 32-year old was working at the LHC while teaching at the nearby Lausanne Institute of Technology.

Given that he is just one of more than 7,000 scientists working on the site and according to colleagues, hadn't been in work for most of the year, it's unclear as to what real treat he posed to the machinery.

As the terrorist storyline was being played out in Lausanne, scientists in Copenhagan and Kyoto were suggesting that a far more outlandish reasoning was behind the LHC's mishaps. Holger Bech Nielsen of the well-respected Niels Bohr Institute along with his Japanese colleague Masao Ninomiya proposed, in a series of papers, a theory that the illusive product of the LHC (the Higgs particle) was travelling back in time to prevent its own existence.

"You could explain it by saying that God rather hates Higgs particles and attempts to avoid them," Bohr says. It's certainly an interesting theory which harks back to that old chestnut: the Grandfather Paradox.

This theory says that if I went back in time and killed my grandfather before he met my grandmother, my father and of course myself would never be born. This would mean that I could not possibly travel back in time and kill my grandfather and therefore I would be born, in which case I could travel back in time and kill....you get the picture. It's a classic paradox.

In terms of the LHC, the theory goes that this illusive Higgs particle has travelled back in time to prevent itself from existing. Of course if it is travelling through time, this must imply that its efforts to destroy itself has already failed.

My head gets sore just thinking about it! Of course, the LHC spokespeople have rejected the theory entirely. Presumably they insisted that a time travelling seagull was not to blame for the baguette in the works!