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The discovery of a particle had the physics world in a spin recently.

Existence of the Higgs boson (or Higgs particle) had been predicted since 1967, but was not confirmed until July in experiments using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC ) at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN ).

If the news story of elated scientists left you wondering what all the excitement was about, UWA 's Head of the School of Physics, Winthrop Professor Ian McArthur, will try to explain.

He will give a lecture, Discovery of the Higgs boson - not the end but a new beginning , later this month. It is the second in the Inquiring Minds series presented by the Institute for Advanced Studies.

The Higgs boson is named after the British theoretical physicist Peter Higgs, who just over 50 years ago, proposed a mechanism by which mass can be given to certain types of elementary particles.

A promising model for the interactions of elementary particles called the Standard Model of Particle Physics was developed in the 1960s and 70s, and incorporated the ‘Higgs mechanism'. In the intervening years, all aspects of the model have been stringently tested, with the exception of the Higgs boson.

The theory was accepted but the particle was hard to find because, as Professor McArthur explained, nobody knew what amount of energy it would take to create a Higgs boson.

"The significance of this discovery is a little indirect but very profound," Professor McArthur said. "It is one of four similar particles that are among the initial ingredients of the Standard Model (along with others such as quarks, electrons and photons). But three of them are not detectable because they are ‘eaten up' to provide mass to some other particles via the Higgs mechanism.

"Finding the fourth one gives us confidence that the Higgs mechanism is a correct description of the origin of the mass of some of the particles in the Standard Model ."

Like to know more? Book a place for this Inquiring Minds lecture in the Social Sciences Lecture Theatre at 6pm on Thursday 13 September. Entry is free but reserve a seat through the Institute for Advanced Studies on 6488 1340 or at [email protected]

Published in UWA News , 3 September 2012