Why would a researcher spend long nights for little money in search of the hopelessly obscure?
Tommaso Dorigo reports from the control room of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), one of the four experiments running at the CERN particle-physics lab just outside Geneva. There is a large answer, of course, the need to solve the mysteries of the universe, but the precise answer for researchers is that while we know that matter is composed of two dozen fermions – six leptons and 18 quarks – interacting by the exchange of a dozen bosons, there is an odd player out there somewhere; a single additional particle, the Higgs boson, that characterizes the excitations of the vacuum in which particles live. The LHC can generate enough energy to "shake" this vacuum and so could finally observe those "Higgs vibrations" that were hypothesized more than 40 years ago but which have so far escaped experimental confirmation.
