CERN announces Higgs boson candidate discovery

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider have announced the discovery of a new particle, likely the long-sought Higgs boson. The CERN researchers were also very careful with the presentation.

The particle’s discovery is apparent from analysis of the collisions in the Large Hadron Collider. That particle could be the long-sought Higgs boson, according to the researchers. From the results of the CMS team and the Atlas team, the two largest detectors at the LHC, the particle would have a mass of about 125GeV. The chance that the observations are due to chance is only about 0.0001 percent, thanks to a significance of 4.9 sigma.

Although more analysis of the data is needed, the putative 125.3GeV particle could be the Higgs boson. With a mass of about one hundred and thirty times that of a proton, the boson is the heaviest known. That mass would fit into the Standard Model, which predicts the Higgs boson and would explain why some particles have mass and others don’t.

In the 1960s, a group of scientists, including the Scotsman Peter Higgs, predicted the existence of an elementary particle that is a crucial component to support current physical theories in the field of mass, among other things. For example, the existence of Higgs demonstrates why photons have no mass and electrons do. The Higgs field formed by Higgs bosons is said to be the mechanism by which particles derive their mass.

At the end of December last year, CERN already found indications for the Higgs boson. Then there was a one in a thousand, or 3 sigma, chance that the measurements were due to chance. From the data analyzed so far, CERN concluded that particles with a mass of 115 to 130 GeV could be the Higgs boson. Evidence for the Higgs boson was also found in the American Tevatron particle accelerator: they estimate the mass between 115 and 135GeV, which corresponds to the CERN findings.

The Large Hadron Collider is a particle accelerator where protons, lead ions and other particles are accelerated to nearly the speed of light. Two beams of particles travel in opposite directions in a ring about 27 kilometers long to collide in detectors, including CMS and Atlas. In these collisions, the particles break apart into elementary particles, building blocks such as quarks, leptons and bosons. These particles are only visible for a very short time before they decay, which makes observation very difficult. Millions of collisions have been detected in the LHC since it was commissioned.