Sometimes, breaking new ground in physics demands exorbitant amounts of energy. Massive machinery. It's all quite nice. Countless hours spent sorting through mountains of information.
The perfect mix of materials may occasionally offer a portal to unseen realms in an area no larger than a tabletop.
Take, for example, this new type of Higgs boson relative. It was discovered in a layered tellurium crystal chunk at ambient temperature. It didn't take years of crushing up particles to find it, though, unlike its renowned relative. It's just a creative use of lasers and a mechanism for untangling the quantum characteristics of their photons.
"It's not every day you find a new particle sitting on your tabletop," adds Kenneth Burch, a Boston College physicist and main co-author of the report revealing the particle's discovery.
Burch and his colleagues discovered an axial Higgs mode, a quantum wobble that technically qualifies as a new type of particle.
Observing theoretical quantum behaviors in action, like so many other quantum physics breakthroughs, brings us closer to exposing potential flaws in the Standard Model and even helps us narrow in on some of the remaining major puzzles.
"The detection of the axial Higgs was predicted in high-energy particle physics to explain dark matter," explains Burch.
Burch and his colleagues caught sight of what's known as an axial Higgs mode, a quantum wiggle that technically qualifies as a new kind of particle.
Like so many discoveries in quantum physics, observing theoretical quantum behaviors in action get us closer to uncovering potential cracks in the Standard Model and even helps us hone in on solving some of the remaining big mysteries.
"However, it has never been observed. Its appearance in a condensed matter system was completely surprising and heralds the discovery of a new broken symmetry state that had not been predicted."
It's been ten years since CERN physicists discovered the Higgs boson amid the chaos of particle collisions. This not only put a stop to the search for the particle, but it also brought the Standard Model's last box — the zoo of basic particles that make up nature's complement of bricks and mortar – to a close.
With the discovery of the Higgs field, scientists could finally validate our knowledge of how model components accumulated mass when at rest. It was a major triumph for physics, and we're still using it to figure out how matter works inside.