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Higgs Boson and Satyendra Nath Bose
( This is an English translation of a Malayalam article by Joseph Antony and which appeared in Mathrbhumi Weekly issued dated 10 th November 2013 . Some portions explaining in detail about the theory and history of quantum physics have been omitted to suit the available space )
Translated by - Rajeeve Chelanat
Francois Englert , a Belgian and Peter Higgs from Britain were conferred the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physics for discovering the answer to the question as to how the particles attained their mass during the birth of universe . Interestingly , the 2013 noble prize was given to a discovery which was made in 1964 . A gap of 49 years .
If the Higgs Boson , largely known as God ’ s Particle had not come up during the particle experiment conducted in Large Hydron Collidor ( LHC ) at CERN Laboratory in Geneva in 2012 , Francois and Peter would have not received the coveted prize even now .
Controversy is still brewing on the way the prizes were conferred to these two , while the theory was actually presented by six researchers in three different papers more or less same time .
This article is not intended to discuss those issues but something different . Almost all the papers have published about the said Nobel Prize and without exception all the newspapers have taken extra care to include the name of Satyendara Nath Bose the Indian scientist .
The purpose of Large Hydrogen Collider which started functioning in the European laboratory CERN in 2008 was to confirm the existence of Higgs Boson . In 2012 , when the news of that confirmation was reported , then too , newspapers had presented it as an achievement of the Indian Satyendra Nath Bose . Facebook and other social networking forums too were flooded with this supposedly Indian connection .
Naturally these claims raise some questions . Did S . N . Bose really formulated this theory ? Does he have any special role in the Boson theory ? Is it the same particle theory that Bose had invented , that was modified by Higgs and associates ? How did that suffix of Boson in Higgs Boson come through ? Is there anything after all for an Indian to take pride in the discovery of Higgs Boson and the conferring of Nobel Prize for that ?
S . N . Bose , Professor of Physics in Dhaka University authored a four page article in 1924 and that article was a derivation of Marx Planck ’ s quantum theory . This article was refused by Philosophical Magazine of England and Bose then sent it to Einstein . Einstein was excited with Bose ’ s theory and translated it to German and moreover he developed that statistics and published three papers on his own and that was how the Bose-Einstein Statistics was born .
Photons , the light particles follow this statistics and hence these particles can sustain same quantum state ( state of energy ). These ‘ noble particles ’, when cooled and brought into the same quantum state would acquire the nature of a ‘ super atom ’ and that state is called Bose- Einstein condensate . It was in 1995 that science succeeded in creating such a new matter .
But there are other particles unlike photon , which do not follow the Bose-Einstein statistics . Say , for example , electrons . They follow ‘ Pauli exclusion principle ’, which took its name from
April , 2016