The RCPTM’s Tiny Contribution to the Nobel Prize in Physics
An animation of the collision of the accelerated opposing beams in the ATLAS / CERN detector.
Source: ATLAS Experiment © CERN 2013
The international team of scientists who have experimentally confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson included three experts from the Regional Centre of Advanced Technologies and Materials (RCPTM): Libor Nožka, Miroslav Hrabovský, and Petr Hamal. This recent experiment confirming the discovery of the once hypothetical elementary particle contributed, in fact, to the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2013, which was awarded to the British physicist Peter Higgs and Belgian scientist François Englert.
Higgs and Englert were awarded their prize for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of the mass of subatomic particles. The Nobel Prize committee acknowledged the “recently confirmed discovery of the predicted fundamental particle” by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva. The experiment was conducted in collaboration with large international teams, who cannot become laureates according to the prize rules.
“Almost three thousand experts participated in the project. Our contribution was minuscule, yet we are pleased and proud, of course. On the other hand, we have been able to see all the difficulties that you have to face during such a discovery. This opens further questions that have to be dealt with in the future. So this is just a nice moment, that’s all,” said Prof. Hrabovský of the RCPTM.
According to Hrabovský, their collaboration with prominent international scientists is not coincidental. The Joint Laboratory of Optics, a joint research centre of Palacký University and the Institute of Physics at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, has been the leader in Czech optics for a number of years. “Through research in optics, we began to collaborate with particle physicists and astrophysicists. We participated in various French programmes in the 1990s and then we collaborated, among other projects, in the Pierre Auger Observatory multinational project which investigates ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, followed by the ATLAS / CERN experiment investigating the basic constituents of matter in the largest accelerator, the LHC,” said Hrabovský.
The experiments were conducted at CERN near Geneva, and subsequent evaluation was provided by scientists at their home institutions. “We worked on the ALFA detector, which is a Czech domain and a part of the ATLAS project. The processes are always modelled beforehand so that we can predict their outcomes. Then the model is later compared to the experiment results. So it is impossible to point your finger and say whose contribution is more significant. Each of the three thousand participants in the project is one of the co-authors, and our contribution cannot be measured,” explained Hrabovský.
The discovery of Higgs boson was announced in 2012. “It is the last tile in the mosaic of the so-called standard model of elementary particles, describing the fundamental building stones of matter,” said Ondřej Haderka, the RCPTM Science Director.
The experiment that confirmed the existence of the so-called “God particle” involved 60 Czech scientists, mostly from the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University in Prague, the Institute of Physics at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, and Czech Technical University in Prague. The Olomouc RCPTM, the newest and smallest particle in the Czech nucleus, was the only participating institute outside of Prague.
