Particle Progress

Here are some of the particles so far. I like them, I think they are really cute so far. The round purple one will be the muon, and the long gray one will be the photon. The star shaped guy in the back is the Higgs Boson (I didn't make that one. I bought it from the http://particlezoo.net/. Thank you to Julie Peasley!)

Here are some thrilling facts about these particles in the context of my senior project:

Muon: This little particle comes from cosmic rays and was detected by a cloud chamber way back in the primordial days of particle physics. To me, this discovery is proof that particles do not always have to be found in particle accelerators, and the Large Hadron Collider is not the be-all-end-all of experimental particle physics. I have faith that our best hope of detecting supersymmetric particles will be through dark matter detection experiments which, like cloud chambers, detect particles that enter our atmosphere from space.

Photon: This particle has to be massless in order for it to travel at the necessary speed of light. It perpetuates electricity, light, and magnetism. If dark matter particles or supersymmetric particles interacted with this particle, we would have easily detected them, as it is one of the easiest forces to measure. Dark matter is called dark because it does not interact with light and thus we cannot perceive it. 

Higgs Boson: Aka "the God Particle," this boson was one of the most recently discovered particles predicted by the Standard Model. The mass of the Higgs Boson produces constraints on supersymmetric parameter space, and limits which supersymmetric models and particles can fit the necessary stability and density to be dark matter. The Higgs Boson should also be much more massive than it is; while it is giving mass to other particles, they are giving mass to it. The supersymmetric contributions to this should cancel the extra contributions and leave us with the nice Higgs mass of ~126 GeV seen in the LHC.