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Monday, July 9, 2012

Satyendra Nath Bose (Giggs Boson Particles)

Indian Scientist Forgotten in Higgs Boson Drama

Scientists in Switzerland said they had discovered a new particle which is likely crucial to current understanding of how the universe is built. But did people know there's an Indian angle to all off this?
No, not that Indians, like all of us, live in the universe. The long-sought particle, known as Higgs boson, is partly named for an Indian scientist.
The scientist in question, Satyendra Nath Bose, worked with Albert Einstein in the 1920s and made discoveries that led to a kind of particle being named for him.
it was Peter Higgs, a British physicist, who in the 1960s made advances in the field, resulting in the naming of  Higgs boson.
For a start, only the "H" in Higgs boson is capitalized in most cases. In many cases, it's referred to as the Higgs particle, erasing all allusion to the Indian scientist.
Last year, The Times of India opined "Bosons are virtually everywhere and we cannot escape from these force-carrying particles of nature that enable inanimate matter to interact with each other to create a lively universe. Everyone knows Higgs Bosons- thanks to the Large Hadron Collider experiment. Unfortunately, no one seems to care about, at least conveniently forgets, Satyendra Nath Bose, the late Indian physicist whose last name bears the mark of a set of particles including the elusive Higgs boson."
Proof that the particle exists would help explain a big puzzle: why some objects in the universe—such as the quark, a constituent of protons—have mass, while other objects—such as photons, the constituent of light—possess only energy.


Satyendra Nath Bose                       Bose-Einstein                                                                                                          

Born1 January 1894
Calcutta, British India (now Kolkata)
Died4 February 1974 (aged 80)
Calcutta, India (now Kolkata)
Nationality Indian
Fields Physics and Mathematics
InstitutionsUniversity of Dhaka
University of Calcutta
Alma materUniversity of Calcutta
Known forBose–Einstein condensate
Bose–Einstein statistics
Bose gas
Notable awardsPadma Vibhushan
Fellow of the Royal Society

Born: January 1, 1894
Died: February 4, 1974






Bose-Einstein Statistics
While presenting a lecture at the University of Dhaka on the theory of radiation and the ultraviolet catastrophe, Bose intended to show his students that the contemporary theory was inadequate, because it predicted results not in accordance with experimental results. During this lecture, Bose committed an error in applying the theory, which unexpectedly gave a prediction that agreed with the experiment (he later adapted this lecture into a short article called Planck's Law and the Hypothesis of Light Quanta).
The error was a simple mistake—similar to arguing that flipping two fair coins will produce two heads one-third of the time—that would appear obviously wrong to anyone with a basic understanding of statistics. However, the results it predicted agreed with experiment, and Bose realized it might not be a mistake at all. He for the first time took the position that the Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution would not be true for microscopic particles where fluctuations due to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle will be significant. Thus he stressed the probability of finding particles in the phase space, each state having volume h3, and discarding the distinct position and momentum of the particles.
He wrote to Albert Einstein
Einstein agreed with him, translated Bose's paper "Planck's Law and Hypothesis of Light Quanta" into German, and saw to it that it was published in Zeitschrift für Physik under Bose's name, in 1924.
The reason Bose's "mistake" produced accurate results was that since photons are indistinguishable from each other, one cannot treat any two photons having equal energy as being two distinct identifiable photons. By analogy, if in an alternate universe coins were to behave like photons and other bosons, the probability of producing two heads would indeed be one-third (tail-head = head-tail). Bose's "error" is now called Bose–Einstein statistics. This result derived by Bose laid the foundation of quantum statistics, as acknowledged by Einstein and Dirac.
Einstein adopted the idea and extended it to atoms. This led to the prediction of the existence of phenomena which became known as Bose-Einstein condensate, a dense collection of bosons (which are particles with integer spin, named after Bose), which was demonstrated to exist by experiment in 1995.
Although more than one Nobel Prize was awarded for research related to the concepts of the boson, Bose–Einstein statistics and Bose–Einstein condensate—the latest being the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics, which was given for advancing the theory of Bose–Einstein condensates—Bose himself was not awarded the Nobel Prize.
In his book, The Scientific Edge, the noted physicist Jayant Narlikar observed:
S. N. Bose's work on particle statistics (c. 1922), which clarified the behaviour of photons (the particles of light in an enclosure) and opened the door to new ideas on statistics of Microsystems that obey the rules of quantum theory, was one of the top ten achievements of 20th century Indian science and could be considered in the Nobel Prize class.

Possible outcomes of flipping two coins
Two heads
Two tails
One of each
There are three outcomes. What is the probability of producing two heads?
Outcome probabilities
Coin 1
Coin 2
Since the coins are distinct, there are two outcomes which produce a head and a tail. The probability of two heads is one-quarter.

Velocity-distribution data of a gas of rubidiumatoms, confirming the discovery of a new phase of matter, the Bose–Einstein condensate. Left: just before the appearance of a Bose–Einstein condensate. Center: just after the appearance of the condensate. Right: after further evaporation, leaving a sample of nearly pure condensate.

Discovery May Help Tell Universe's Secrets

After Half-Century Search, Scientists Pin Down Higgs-Like Particle, Closing In on Explanation for Why All Objects Exist

The particle's namesake, British physicist Peter Higgs was one of several theorists in the 1960s to predict its existence. 'It is an incredible thing that it has happened in my lifetime,' he said.

Physicists said they had discovered a new particle that is consistent with the Higgs boson, a long-sought particle crucial to scientists' current understanding of how the universe is built..."We have observed a new boson," said Joe Incandela of the University of California, Santa Barbara, a member of one of the groups reporting the new data. His colleague Rolf-Dieter Heuer, director general of CERN, put it in simpler terms: "I think we have it," he said. The particle is named after British physicist Peter Higgs, one of the theorists who predicted its existence nearly a half-century ago. Now 83 years old, the unassuming Mr. Higgs attended the meeting in Geneva. Bosuns themselves are named in honor of Satyendra Nath Bose, Albert Einstein's Indian collaborator.
Mr. Higgs received a round of applause as he entered the auditorium, and shed a tear when news of the Higgs-like particle was announced. "It is an incredible thing that it has happened in my lifetime," he said.
It's been a tough quest, involving thousands of scientists in dozens of countries. No one could predict the mass of the Higgs boson, so they had to hunt for it indirectly. This was done at CERN by propelling particles to near-light speed and then smashing them together to generate an array of other subatomic particles.

The researchers hoped that one such particle would be the Higgs itself, though it would almost instantly decay into different combinations of other particles. Finding it would then involve looking for statistically significant "excesses" of those particles.

The latest experiments at LHC found excesses of this sort in the data. The newly discovered particle is definitely a boson and one of the heaviest such particles to be discovered so far, CERN said. It has a mass of between 125-126 GeV, or gigaelectronvolts, making it about 134 times as heavy as a proton.
The Higgs particle offers an answer to how particles might acquire mass. Physicists hypothesize that as the universe cooled after the Big Bang, about 13.7 billion years ago, a force known as the Higgs field formed, along with the particle.

Under this scenario, the Higgs field permeates the universe, and any particles that interact with it are given a mass through the Higgs boson. The more they interact, the heavier they become. Particles that don't interact with the Higgs field are left with no mass at all.

"It is like a big vat of molasses," said Dan Green, a physicist at Fermilab. "As particles go through this, they travel at less than the speed of light and it looks like they acquire mass."

It remains to be seen whether CERN's particle is exactly the one predicted by the standard model or an exotic version. If it is a variant, that would suggest an even more intriguing description of reality.
The three-story, 6,000-ton CDF detector that records snapshots of particles at the U.S. Department of Energy's Tevatron collider near Chicago. Scientists at the facility released fresh data bolstering the case for the existence of the Higgs boson
(courtesy to Wikipedia, Wallstreet, OneIndia, Times of India websites)

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