The project Higgs Hunters is opening doors for citizen scientists to take part in learning more about the mysterious Higgs boson discovered at CERN in 2012. The initiative hopes to enlist volunteers in what could possibly be the next breakthrough in understanding the so-called "God particle."
Researchers at CERN have started putting data from experiments conducted with the Large Hadron Collider online for the public to examine. They hope that volunteers, who will be looking at an online database of 25,000 images of particle collisions captured by the LHC, will be able to help them comprehend what happens when Higgs bosons -- created in such collisions -- die.
The LHC images show that following the creation of a Higgs boson, it decays rapidly while new particles are born.
These new particles might include new kinds of previously unobserved types, which an army of volunteers scanning the images might be able to identify, researchers say.
"We want volunteers to help us go beyond the Higgs boson barrier by examining pictures of these collisions and telling us what they see," says physicist Alan Barr from Oxford University in Britain.
Volunteers will be asked to examine the images and report how many distinct lines they see shooting outward from the particle collision point.
A tutorial will be provided for volunteers to help them understand what scientists hope will be seen in the images, says Barr, who is serving as lead scientist for the Higgs Hunters project.
Computers have been used to look at the images, but just a fraction of the thousands in the database have been examined by human eyes, he says.
A large number of volunteers, each looking at a few images, could scan the complete contents of the online database in just a matter of weeks, he says.
"Some of the greatest discoveries in science have been made when someone noticed something odd or unexpected," Barr explains. "People are amazingly good at spotting odd and unusual things that the computer algorithms may have missed."
If volunteers do spot something unexpected or unusual, it will give CERN scientists new targets when the LHC resumes operations in early 2015 at higher energy levels than were used before, researchers say.
The Higgs Hunters project is the perfect opportunity for volunteers to take part in a possible significant scientific discovery, they say.
"It would be amazing if the next big discovery about the fundamental make-up of the universe was started by someone at home saying 'That looks weird,'" says Barr.
