The University of Wisconsin-Madison welcomed one of its own professors to campus Thursday to speak about her role in the discovery of the Higgs boson, also referred to as “the God particle.”
Sau Lan Wu, a physics professor at UW-Madison since 1977, told a crown of over 100 people how researchers detected the particle and how the university played a star role in the discovery.
The Higgs boson’s existence was first proposed by Peter Higgs in 1964, and the particle is said to give all other particles mass.
Wu led a team of UW-Madison researchers who aided in the operation of the Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator located near Geneva, Switzerland, which helped prove the existence of the Higgs boson.
According to Wu, the machine creates conditions similar to those immediately following the Big Bang, which are necessary to find the particle.
The university also contributed to the discovery through its analysis of the data received from the Large Hadron Collider through the United States Open Science Grid, a national collaboration intended to collect and analyze research data from around the world.
Interim Chancellor David Ward introduced Wu and congratulated her, as well as everyone involved from UW-Madison, on their success in the discovery.
“We are tremendously proud of the dozens of Badgers, including numerous students, involved in the pioneering work of the [Large Hadron Collider],” Ward said.
In order to authenticate the discovery, researchers conducted two independent experiments to prove the results were accurate. UW-Madison was one of the few institutions from the U.S. to have members in both experiments, Wu said.
A UW-Madison graduate student was one of two physicists who first obtained data showing the results of the experiment had only a one in 300 million chance of being caused by random fluctuation.
The discovery of the Higgs boson was the culmination of almost three decades of work and thousands of physicists from 56 nations around the world, according to Wu.
“It was a giant step toward understanding the fundamental laws of nature,” Wu said. “It is the discovery of the century.”
