Free Science SoftwareThe Higgs boson field is the mechanism which extends the Standard Model to explain how particles acquire the properties associated with mass. The Higgs boson is the exchange particle in this field; it has not yet been discovered. Theorists estimate that accelerator energies of around 1TeV are the minimum required to detect the Higgs. Thus there is some chance that the Higgs will be found in Run II of the Tevatron at Fermilab. More likely, the Higgs will be discovered and studied by Large Hadron Collider.
Finding The Higgs Boson is the imperative of the two most powerful particle accelerators ever built---the Tevatron at Fermilab, now reaching the peak of its decades-long performance, and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, where beams will circulate for the first time around a 27-km track within the next few months. Why is the Higgs so important? Because it is thought to pervade the universal vacuum; not, as with the old aether, to provide a material substrate for the propagation of electromagnetic waves, but rather to interact with particles and confer mass upon them.
As for the prospective scenario for discoveries at LHC in coming years, Seiden said that finding evidence for a supersymmetric particle (one of a large family of hypothetical particles) might be possible as early as the year 2009, while finding the Higgs might be possible by 2010.
