Physicist Professor Alan Martin, left, talks about how Durham University is playing an important role in the search for the elusive Higgs particle.

AT the end of the BBC episodes of the Frozen Planet, there is a short series of images that summarise the amazing diversity of natural life, accompanied by poetic words from David Attenborough.

He neatly concludes with the understatement “...what a wonderful world”.

It is equally wonderful to look out from our planet at the solar system and at our galaxy, the Milky Way. Telescopes tell us that there are about 100 billion known galaxies, each containing on average about 100 billion stars; many, presumably, with their own planets.

It is even more amazing that a single set of physical laws underpin all these remarkable phenomena.

The laws governing them are based on symmetries, and are themselves truly beautiful and elegant.

The fundamental particles of matter interact with each other in various ways in what is known as the Standard Model of particle physics, whose symmetries have been unravelled by numerous dedicated experiments over the past 50 years or so and verified with incredible accuracy.

But the way the known particles interact and relate to each other seems to imply the existence of another – as yet unseen – particle.

All the particles are found to have mass, except for photons and gluons, which have zero mass.

Indeed, the Standard Model precisely predicted the masses of the W and Z bosons before they were discovered in 1983, boding well for its reliability.

But there remains a serious problem. The beautiful fundamental laws of the Standard Model appear to demand that all the fundamental particles have zero mass, yet clearly they don’t.

So what is going on? This is where the – so-far unseen – Higgs particle comes in. It provides an ingenious resolution of the mass dilemma, which was proposed in 1964 by Newcastle- born Peter Higgs while at Edinburgh University (and independently by Robert Brout and Francois Englert).

This solution of giving mass to the fundamental particles is known as the Higgs mechanism.

Basically, the idea is that space is not empty, but is filled by a so-called “Higgs field”, which interacts with the particles and gives them mass.

Very neat; but for decades this Higgs particle has been searched for by successive particle accelerators without success, despite experiments constantly narrowing the mass region within which it might exist.

However, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), now operating at Cern (European Organisation for Nuclear Research) near Geneva will, for sure, have sufficient energy to locate the Higgs particle, if indeed it is there.

THE LHC is one of the most complex and anticipated scientific instruments ever built. First operated in 2008, it is housed in a 27km underground circular tunnel in which two beams of very energetic protons orbit in opposite directions and are delicately manoeuvred to smash into each other head-on at four sites around the ring.

Each one of these sites is surrounded by a truly giant detector in an attempt to pick up signals from the Higgs particle and other novel effects.

The detectors are themselves composed of layers of sophisticated devices to track and identify the numerous particles created in each proton-proton collision.

It is fair to say that the LHC has driven technological progress to the very limit. The dedication and teamwork of thousands of people, across all cultures and from all continents, to bring the project to successful fruition, must surely be the most remarkable collaborative achievement of mankind to date.

In the dozen years since the establishment of Durham University’s Institute of Particle Physics Phenomenology (IPPP) in 2000, the university and institute have been playing an increasingly important and unique role in the search for the Higgs particle – a role that provides a bridge between theory and experiment.

The IPPP was founded as a joint venture between Durham University and the Science and Technology Facilities Council. Indeed, the IPPP rapidly achieved world-wide recognition for research excellence in its field.

In doing so, members of the IPPP, together with the present director, Professor Valya Khoze, have undertaken vital calculations for the LHC, have provided theoretical input for further experiments with the LHC detectors, and are helping to analyse the data now pouring out of them.

The IPPP is therefore playing a very significant part in the search for the Higgs and beyond.

There are great expectations that its existence, or otherwise, will be proven some time this year, following tantalising glimpses of possible Higgs signals indicated by the Cern experiments last December.

HOWEVER, discovery of the Higgs would not be the end, but merely a new beginning, for both the LHC and IPPP.

Indeed, in some ways it will be even more exciting if the Higgs does not exist, because we then would know that the beautiful symmetry of the fundamental laws must be hidden in some alternative ingenious way; and, moreover, that the LHC has the capability to discover it for sure.

The Standard Model of particle physics cannot, after all, be a complete description of Nature, and we need clues from the LHC experiments of what may lie beyond it.

Yet, even if, as many expect, we discover the Higgs particle, there are many more horizons for the LHC and the IPPP to discover.

• Professor Alan Martin FRS, is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Physics, Durham University, and a founder member of the University’s Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology.