But how could a collision of tiny particles like protons produce a massive particle like the Higgs?
In our macro-world, crashing things together, like cars, makes big things into smaller things, like broken headlights and fenders. But it's different in the subatomic world, where crashing two Priuses together can produce a 10-wheeler.
"Remember," Gagnon said, "according to Einstein, mass is congealed energy." In other words, if you create enough energy in one place, it can remake itself into a chunk of mass.
Gagnon compared the particles that have been created in other colliders to rubber ducks. "We've made millions of duckies," Gagnon said. "Now we want to make an elephant."
Because the new collider will be seven times as powerful as the Tevatron, if the Higgs boson exists, the CERN collider should find it.
"If we don't find the Higgs, the theorists have a lot of explaining to do," said UCLA postdoctoral student Greg Rakness over lunch in the CERN cafeteria, where one can hear conversations in a dozen languages.
The huge burst of energy in particle collisions becomes a kind of time machine, transporting scientists back to the first microseconds after the Big Bang.
The universe was only about 200 million miles wide, consisting of a viscous cloud of quarks and gluons floating in a searing plasma. As the universe expanded and cooled, the quarks combined to make protons and neutrons. The gluons held them together to form the nuclei of atoms.
To re-create this plasma, one of the collider's detectors, known as ALICE, will accelerate heavy lead ions. One of the heaviest of all elements, each lead atom contains 82 protons and 125 neutrons.
By pounding these sacks of protons and neutrons together, the scientists hope to free the quarks and gluons from their embrace into a free-floating quark-gluon plasma.
With this re-creation of the early moments of the universe, scientists may also be able to delve into the unexplained imbalance between matter and antimatter. So far, experiments have not been able to explain why there's so much matter in the universe and no antimatter, beyond what is created in colliders.
According to experiments, there should be 1020 (100 billion billion) more photons of light than protons of matter in the universe. In fact, Nakada said, the number is closer to 1010. That's a huge amount of unexplained matter in the form of galaxies, stars, planets and theoretical physicists.
