Could the Large Hadron Collider Discover the Particle Underlying Both Mass and Cosmic Inflation?
Friday, June 29, 2012 - 05:30
in Physics & Chemistry
Within a sliver of a second after it was born, our universe expanded staggeringly in size, by a factor of at least 1026. That's what most cosmologists maintain, although it remains a mystery as to what might have begun and ended this wild expansion. Now scientists are increasingly wondering if the most powerful particle collider in history , the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe, could shed light on this mysterious growth, called inflation, by catching a glimpse of the particle behind it. It could be that the main target of the collider's current experiments, the Higgs boson , which is thought to endow all matter with mass, could also be this inflationary agent. [More]