CERN's Detection of Higgs Boson Confirmed

 

           

 

Two laboratories working at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) had jointly announced on July 4 they had detected a new fundamental particle in experiments at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva. The discovery has been hailed as one of the biggest scientific achievements ever. The teams, from labs called Atlas and the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), on Monday each published their findings in the European journal Physics Letters B.

Although CERN's announcement was never doubted, it still had to be vetted by peers and then published in an established journal to meet benchmarks of accuracy and openness. Further work is being carried out to confirm whether the new particle is the famous Higgs, whose existence was theorised back in 1964 to explain why elementary particles obtain mass. Without the Higgs, atoms could not form, which means the physical Universe would not exist, including the galaxy cluster in the Perseus Constellation shown above, say scientists.

"The discovery reported in these papers is a momentous step forward in fundamental knowledge," said Atlas spokeswoman Fabiola Gianotti. "It is the culmination of more than 20 years of effort of the worldwide high-energy physics community to build and operate instruments of unprecedented technology, complexity and performance."

More than 5,000 researchers worldwide took part in the long quest, and both papers are dedicated to the memory of colleagues who had died. Physics Letters B was where British physicist Peter Higgs first published a letter, "Broken symmetries, massless particles and gauge fields," that sparked the hunt for the boson. His name is attached to the particle, but two other groups of theoreticians can also claim to have made major contributions. * Journal reference: Physics Letters B.

 

          

 

The Daily Galaxy via AFP and www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0370269312001852

Comments

[radii]

a shadow of wisp of a trail was recorded - and picked out by computers out of trillions of possibilities and it may match what theory predicts about energy potentials in a scalar field ... I got my palm read at a county fair recently and the detector of msyteries said I will travel over a body of water

[ihumanity]

okay you found it. now what?

[Radii (_!_)]

Radii, you're clearly an eminent physicist, as you're posting your lonely pissy comment here. Please, by all means, let us see your groundbreaking work as you obviously know more than those intellectuals the article is about.

[stonewolf]

is it is or is it ain't the Higgs. What does, " further work is being carried out to confirm whether or not the new particle is the famous Higgs", mean? Remember the sigma six fiasco at Gran Sasso.

[rg]

i have been watching and holding my breath on the higgs for many years. july was a big day. now, i can let my breath out. congrats gentlemen. time for the believers to become nonbeliever and the nonbelievers to become believers.