Higgs hunters close in on their quarry Dec 13, 2011 21 comments
The first solid experimental evidence for the existence of the
Higgs boson has been unveiled today by physicists working on the
Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva. Members of the
ATLAS experiment revealed evidence that the Higgs particle has a
mass of about 126 GeV/c2. Physicists working on the rival CMS
experiment released similar – albeit weaker – evidence for a
Higgs with a mass of about 124 GeV/c2. However, ATLAS
spokesperson Fabiola Gianotti cautions that the measurements are
not good enough yet to claim the discovery of the particle.
Physicists are keen to discover the Higgs boson to complete the
Standard Model of particle physics. The particle and its
associated field are needed to explain how electroweak symmetry
broke just after the Big Bang – which gave certain elementary
particles the property of mass. The Standard Model does not,
however, actually predict the mass of the Higgs, and successive
experimental programmes at CERN