The discovery of the Higgs boson

Elay, Antzuola and Bergara Town Council, 3 April 2014

The discovery of the Higgs boson (4 July 2012) is one of the most important scientific findings of recent times and it also attracted an unprecedented amount of media interest. It would be impossible to deny the significant contribution that this discovery has made towards rounding off the most "complete" theory of physics for describing space and time, otherwise known as the "standard model". It is also impossible to deny the conceptual beauty of the idea which underlies the Higgs boson, i.e. that of a field which permeates the whole universe and which endows elementary particles with mass as they interact with it.

One further aspect which is hugely important is the magnitude of the scientific devices that were used for the discovery of the Higgs boson. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is more than just a standard piece of scientific equipment. It has a 27 kilometre ring that consists of superconducting electromagnets. These operate at a temperature of -271.3ºC and are located in a tunnel that has been excavated between Switzerland and France, close to Geneva. Construction began back in 1995 and has cost €2 billion, plus a further €190 million for experiments. It also has an annual budget of €220 million for computers and data storage and €18 million for electricity. According to the figures for 2012, the total annual budget for the LHC is approximately €765 million.

The discovery of the Higgs boson is therefore the result of many sciences working alongside the industry that built the collider. A triumph for teamwork. Natural sciences, (super)computer sciences, virtually all forms of engineering and industrial engineering and operations research have worked in close collaboration to make a success of this project which, like all scientific projects, creates more questions than it answers but also opens up a promising future for so-called “knowledge industries”.

As a result, there are companies in the Basque Country that have played a major part in this discovery yet they remain "hidden". One of these is Elay Taldea, a company which manufactured a large amount of scientific equipment that was used to build CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This places the Basque Country among the elite of modern technology.

In order to get the employees that make such technology possible involved in these events, Jakiunde organised two conferences on 3 April 2014. In the first of these, Elay Taldea employees took part in a meeting with Hegoi Garitaonaindia, a researcher at CERN. This event was held at the company's own premises in Antzuola and saw Hegoi explain what role the components made by Elay had played in the discovery of the Higgs boson. The meeting took place at 13:00 when the event was opened by the President of Gipuzkoa, Martín Garitano.

In the afternoon, Pedro Miguel Etxenike held a conference which was open to the public called “From the small to the large, from the simple to the complex: The sublime usefulness of useless science” at the chambers in Bergara Town Hall.

With this initiative, Jakiunde's aim has been to bring scientific knowledge closer to Basque society in collaboration with Jakiunde's own academics and researchers at DIPC (Donostia International Physics Center). They have also been working alongside the Provincial Council of Gipuzkoa, Bergara Town Council and, most importantly, Elay Taldea, whose employees played a central role in the conference as they learned about the final purpose of their work.