CERN Confirms New Particle --"We Know it Must be a Boson"

 

          

 

“I think we have it,” said Rolf Heuer, the director general of CERN, in an interview with The New York Times from his office outside of Geneva. "We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature,” Heuer said of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson that opens the way to more detailed studies, requiring larger statistics, which will pin down the new particle’s properties, and is likely to shed light on other mysteries of our universe.

The Higgs boson is a potential key to understanding why elementary particles have mass and to the existence of diversity and life in the universe.

Both the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN observed a new particle in the mass region around 125-126 GeV, physicists announced at a seminar held at CERN yesterday.

The next step will be to determine the precise nature of the particle and its significance for our understanding of the universe. Are its properties as expected for the long-sought Higgs boson, the final missing ingredient in the Standard Model of particle physics? Or is it something more exotic?

The Standard Model describes the fundamental particles from which we, and every visible thing in the universe, are made, and the forces acting between them. All the matter that we can see, however, appears to be no more than about 4% of the total. A more exotic version of the Higgs particle could be a bridge to understanding the 96% of the universe that remains obscure.

“We observe in our data clear signs of a new particle, at the level of 5 sigma, in the mass region around 126 GeV. The outstanding performance of the LHC and ATLAS and the huge efforts of many people have brought us to this exciting stage,” said ATLAS experiment spokesperson Fabiola Gianotti, “but a little more time is needed to prepare these results for publication.”

"The results are preliminary but the 5 sigma signal at around 125 GeV we’re seeing is dramatic. This is indeed a new particle. We know it must be a boson and it’s the heaviest boson ever found,” said CMS experiment spokesperson Joe Incandela. “The implications are very significant and it is precisely for this reason that we must be extremely diligent in all of our studies and cross-checks.”

“It’s hard not to get excited by these results,” said CERN Research Director Sergio Bertolucci. “ We stated last year that in 2012 we would either find a new Higgs-like particle or exclude the existence of the Standard Model Higgs. With all the necessary caution, it looks to me that we are at a branching point: the observation of this new particle indicates the path for the future towards a more detailed understanding of what we’re seeing in the data.”

The results presented today are labelled preliminary. They are based on data collected in 2011 and 2012, with the 2012 data still under analysis. Publication of the analyses shown today is expected around the end of July. A more complete picture of today’s observations will emerge later this year after the LHC provides the experiments with more data.

Positive identification of the new particle’s characteristics will take considerable time and data. But whatever form the Higgs particle takes, our knowledge of the fundamental structure of matter is about to take a major step forward.

Image at the top of the page is a simulation of the two-photon channel shows what ATLAS sees when the decay of a Higgs boson results in the production of two gamma rays. The blue beads indicate intermediate massive particles, and the bright green rods are the gamma-ray tracks. While the two-photon channel is the least likely Higgs decay, it is easier to observe than others with even noisier backgrounds.

The Daily Galaxy via CERN 

Image Credit: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

 

Comments

[John]

Amazing. We seem to have reached the edge somethingness and nothingness.

[radii]

these atom-smashers take billions of images and they look through a handful (computers do the sorting), and what they're looking at are debris trails and from that they infer what type of particle made a particular trail - an unusual one is a candidate for a "new" particle ... all they are doing is liberating "hidden mass" for ever briefer periods of time as the energies go up - they can find countless other "new" particles if they keep at this

[George Botha]

We are so fortunate to have the services of particle physicists at our disposal here at TDG ....Editor's Comment: Ha, ha...that perfect!

[Narendra Nath]

The experiment is amazing but its analysis requires a bias free broad mind that can develop a good overlap with the cosmic mind. I feel that the very heavy quarks and some charge neutrals must also form the assembly of primordial matter. It should always be kept in mind that visible matter is just 4% while the mysterious dark matter is ten times the visible one. Thus primordial matter has to contain its ancestors too in large proportion. I suspect the present day Physics may not hold at the Big Bang moment and one may envisage a sequential emergence of gravity, strong nuclear, e.m and weak nuclear field and their initial strengths may also not correspond to the current ratios worked out.

[MarionScott]

A few hundred years ago a man flying a kite 'discovered' a new force of nature. A short time later another man applied that dicovery to make a light bulb and the world changed forever. Just imagine how these recent discoverys are going to affect future generations.

[Singaporistu]

next thing discover the energy field that Higgs Boson is stumbling on to create the gravity, manage to control it(swim on it) and pack you bags for interstellar travel. Perhaps Alcubierre drive is achievable after all ...

[George Botha]

I think most of us English-speaking plebs don't have the foggiest notion what you said there, but just reading it made me curious as to how it would sound if you spoke it out loud ....

[George Botha]

Google translate identifies your language as Maltese, and translates it thus:

I have been wondering about this topic, so thanks for sharing. I will certainly be subscribing to your blog.

Well all I can say is that you have stumbled upon the right place, because The Daily Galaxy is probably one of the very most progressive websites that I know.

[Steve Savage "King of the Beasts"]

"The Daily Galaxy is probably one of the very most progressive websites that I know."

Strongly second your opinion, George Botha. Every morning I look forward to seeing what's new and interesting on TDG. Never disappointed.

Steve Savage "King of the Beasts"

[smartypants]

"We Know it Must be a Boson" really isn't the same as "It IS a Boson".

brain space
For someone with such a low opinion of this site you sound like you spend a lot of time here.

;) Editor's note: Brain Space is from a competing site. What he doesn't acknowledge is that "We know it must be a boson" is a direct quote from a CERN physicist. All science sites --PhysOrg, Wired, New Scientist, etc use releases from the same basic sources: NASA, ESA, JPL, Royal Academy of Science, Harvard, Stanford, and so forth. TDG tries to add value from available literature and photographic excellence equal to any news source out there. We have over 197,000 Twitter followers a day (and growing at 10,000 per month) --and includes the world's leading experts from every space and science org and university.