CERN physicists announce near-certain discovery of Higgs boson

Friday, July 6, 2012

An example of simulated data resulting from the Large Hadron Collider, in which signatures of Higgs boson could be detected.
Image: CERN.

On Wednesday, physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced the discovery of a new elementary particle, which is likely to be the Higgs boson. The particle, having roughly 125 times the mass of a proton, has a one in 3.5 million chance of not being the Higgs boson, according to researchers at ATLAS.

Identification of the particle has involved pouring over large amounts of data generated by CERN's Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest particle accelerator, of which ATLAS is a part. According to Bob Jones, head of CERN Openlab, the Large Hadron Collider generates 1 petabyte (1 million gigabytes) of raw data per second. Large volumes of data must be constantly filtered in order to reveal information relevant to the Higgs boson.

The Higgs boson, also know as "the God Particle", is thought to be related to the origin of mass in the Standard Model of particle physics. Its near-certain discovery is a pronounced step forward in modern physics' understanding of the creation of the universe, as well as a significant achievement of the Standard Model. The Higgs boson was one of the last major missing pieces of the Standard Model theory, which describes the mechanics of the universe at the level of elementary particles.

Peter Higgs in 2009.
Image: Andrew A. Ranicki.

Peter Higgs, who first theorized the particle in 1964, said "To me it's really an incredible thing that it's happened in my lifetime". The probable discovery of the particle named in his honor is likely to lead to a Nobel prize for Higgs, who is now 83 years old.