Physicists from the Cern research lab in Geneva announced that they have made significant progress in the hunt for the Higgs boson, but the result does not provide definitive evidence for the long-sought particle.
The teams announced signals consistent with the appearance of the Higgs boson, and the results suggest a Higgs particle mass of about in the range of 115 to 130 gigaelectronvolts (GeV). However, the signals could also be explained if the Higgs field doesn't exist -- it could just be background fluctuation.
More data will be needed to establish the existence of the Higgs with confidence. The Atlas and CMS experiments will gather significantly more data in 2012 -- but until then, a definitive answer to the question "does the Higgs boson exist" is still out of reach.
"Given the outstanding performance of the LHC this year, we will not need to wait long for enough data and can look forward to resolving this puzzle in 2012," said Atlas experiment spokesperson Fabiola Gianotti.
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Two teams of physicists working with Cern's Large Hadron Collider in Geneva are expected to announce that they have found the best evidence yet for the hypothetical elementary particle: the Higgs boson.
The teams -- Atlas and CMS -- have been working independently to hunt for signs of the elusive particle. But what is the Higgs boson, and why do you need to recreate events a fraction of a second after the Big Bang to find it?
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It's named after Edinburgh University physicist Peter Higgs, who proposed that atoms receive their mass from an invisible field that's spread throughout the cosmos. Like wading through treacle, atoms pick up mass as they whizz through the Higgs field.
The Higgs is an answer to the physics conundrum of why the building blocks of matter have a mass at all. This stops them from zipping about the universe at the speed of light, and allows them to bind together to form planets, humans, kangaroos and asteroids.
Its existence is essential for the Standard Model, which is the universally-accepted scientific theory to explain the dynamics of subatomic particles. The Higgs boson has always been the one missing ingredient to this model, but if it doesn't exist then the Standard Model shatters into pieces.
| To find evidence for its existence, physicists built the LHC: a $10 billion (£6bn) particle accelerator that's housed in a 18-mile tunnel, deep beneath near the French-Swiss border. This monstrous physics laboratory can recreate conditions that existed a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. |
The collider makes beams of protons move at close to the speed of light, before smashing them into each other. This spectacular head-on collision causes other types of particles to splinter off -- hopefully including the Higgs boson.
If it exists, the Higgs is so unstable that it would rapidly decay into more stable, and lighter subatomic particles. But that decay would leave behind a telltale fingerprint, showing up on the physicists' graphs as a very exciting bump.
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