The Higgs Boson and the Fate of the Universe
The discovery of the Higgs boson at the CERN Large Hadron Collider poses new challenges to our understanding of basic quantum physics. Unless other new physics intervenes, we appear to live in a universe that is slightly unstable and will eventually decay catastrophically.
Supersymmetry can stabilize the vacuum, but so far searches for superpartner particles at the LHC have come up empty. New ideas jettison supersymmetry, and instead connect the Higgs boson to dark matter.
Joseph David Lykken is a theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
| The Higgs Boson and the Fate of the Universe |
| Related Links |
| The Hunt for the Higgs This is a BBC Horizon documentary presented by Jim Al-Khalili, revealing how CERN is searching for the Higgs particle and why it is so significant. |
| The Higgs Boson Explained This Talk explains what the Higgs is, why it was predicted and how it was proven to exist. |
| The Particle at the End of the Universe Sean Carroll reveals the history-making forces of insight, rivalry, and wonder that fuelled the Higgs search and how its discovery opens a door into the mind-boggling domain of dark matter and other phenomena we never predicted. |
| Expanding Our Horizon: Matter, Space and the Universe Professor Lisa Randall will tell us about the Higgs boson discovery and its implications. She will also explore possibilities for the nature of dark matter and of space itself. |
| Mysteries of Matter at the LHC Two years ago, the Higgs Boson was discovered by the ATLAS and CMS experiments. But how precisely does it fill its role as the last missing piece in the Standard Model of particle physics? |