During the global campaign, on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the discovery of the Higgs boson, which the Institute of Physics, Belgrade also took part in, the media in Serbia demonstrated considerable interest in the CERN and the research conducted in this European organization. As RTS reported in the text ‘Higgs Boson: 10 Years since Discovery of ‘God Particle’, it had been exactly 10 years ago, on 4 July 2012, that two groups of physicists on the LHC simultaneously announced the discovery of a new particle with properties that suggested it was the Higgs boson. The list of media outlets that reported on the anniversary of one of the most significant discoveries of modern times is as follows: Danas, Novosti, Tanjug, Studio B, Dnevnik and others.
‘The discovery of the Higgs boson is of momentous importance to modern high-energy physics, and a few of our colleagues took part in the data analyses that directly contributed to this discovery,’ for the N1 television said Dr Predrag Milenović, an associate professor of the Faculty of Physics in Belgrade that cooperates with researchers from the Institute of Physics, Belgrade, and is a coordinator of the physicist group that conducts research on the Higgs boson properties at the CERN.
Dr Milenović detailed what it was like to work in the teams that detected the ‘God particle, in the show ‘Dan uživo’ broadcast on 5 July 2022 on the N1 television, calling this discovery a triumph of modern physics and the Standard Model. ‘In these past ten years, we have overseen a rather extensive programme of measurement of the Higgs boson properties. However, to date, we have aggregated only a tenth of the data that we are to collect in the future using the Large Hadron Collider, stated Dr Milenović, adding that the researchers at the CERN continued with collisions on even higher energies on the date of the anniversary.
Dr Jelena Jovićević of the Institute of Physics, Belgrade spoke on the same TV show, explaining why decades had to pass to prove the existence of the Higgs boson. ‘First and foremost, it was necessary to develop accelerator and detector technology so that in laboratory conditions, we could reach high energies at which we could create the Higgs boson and develop technologies able to detect it,’ said Dr Jovićević. She explained that the Higgs boson had been a missing element in the Standard Model Theory which describes what the matter consists of and how it interacts with each other.