In 2010, CERN's Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus (ALPHA) team created and corralled antihydrogen for about a sixth of a second, and in 2011, they maintained the antimatter for more than 15 minutes. However, the antimatter collided with matter and was annihilated before scientists could study it. In 1995, CERN scientists succeeded in creating a form of antimatter called antihydrogen, a negatively charged version of hydrogen, in the PS210 experiment at the Low Energy Antiproton Ring. When matter and antimatter combine, they annihilate each other, releasing enormous amounts of energy and producing high-energy particles such as gamma-rays. Īntimatter consists of particles that have the same mass as a particle of matter but an opposite electrical charge (as well as other properties). The findings agreed well with the Standard Model. The discovery of these light, ghostly particles was made at the Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP), using an instrument called the ALEPH detector. Uncharged elementary particles with very little or no mass, neutrinos only rarely interact with other particles, and thus are sometimes called "ghost particles." In 1989, CERN scientists determined the number of families of particles containing what are known as light neutrinos. The two scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics the following year. Using a particle accelerator called the Super Proton Synchrotron, particle physicists Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer led a team that found proof of the bosons in experiments called UA1 and UA2. Their discovery was a major boon to the Standard Model. The two W bosons (W+ and W-) have the same mass but opposite electrical charges, while the Z boson has no charge. In 1983, a decade after CERN scientists detected weak neutral currents, they discovered the W and Z bosons, elementary particles that mediate the weak force. The theorists were awarded a Nobel Prize for their work in 1979. Theoretical physicists Abdus Salam, Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg predicted weak neutral currents in the same year that scientists at CERN confirmed these currents' existence. The discovery of neutral currents helped unify two of the fundamental interactions of nature (electromagnetism and the weak force) as the electroweak force. Weak neutral currents are one way that subatomic particles can interact via the weak force, one of the four fundamental interactions in particle physics. In 1973, one of the first major discoveries came out of CERN: the detection of so-called weak neutral currents, inside a device called the Gargamelle bubble chamber. Peter Higgs and Belgian physicist Francois Englert were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 2013 for their prediction of the Higgs boson's existence. The discovery of the Higgs boson represents the final piece of the puzzle in the Standard Model of particle physics, a theory that describes how three of the four fundamental forces - electromagnetic, weak and strong nuclear forces - interact at the subatomic level (but does not include gravity). Less than a year later, after physicists had collected two-and-a-half times more data inside the LHC, the researchers confirmed that the newfound particle was, indeed, the Higgs. In 2012, after a decades-long hunt, two experiments at the LHC detected a new elementary particle weighing about 126 times as much as a proton, the positively charged particle found in the nucleus of an atom. It was nicknamed the "God particle" after a 1993 book by physicist Leon Lederman and science writer Dick Teresi, but many physicists - including Higgs himself - reject the term as being sensational. This particle became known as the Higgs boson. Higgs thought this field would have a particle associated with it - one that is thought to give all other particles their mass. In the 1960s, British physicist Peter Higgs hypothesized the existence of a field through which all particles would be dragged - like marbles moving through molasses - giving the particles mass.
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