The Higgs Boson at Last?

Evidence for a new particle that was detected at the Large Hadron Collider was confirmed in 2012 to be the fabled Higgs. The particle's namesake and another theorist have now received the 2013 Nobel in physics

On December 13, CERN will release the results of a new data analysis in the search for the Higgs boson. at the LHC. As I was reporting my article, which appeared today, on December 7 I spoke on the phone with Joe Lykken, a Fermilab staff theoretical physicist.

Lyn Evans led the design and construction of CERN's Large Hadron Collider They call it “the machine.”Thousands of physicists working at the LHC are looking for the Higgs boson and other new particles, and many of them have contributed to building the gigantic detectors that are taking most of the media limelight these days.But humming 100 meters under the Franco-Swiss border is the apparatus that makes it all possible.

A particle, which might be a Higgs boson, decaying into muons in the ATLAS detector. Credit: ATLAS Experiment/CERN If you've read anything about the Higgs boson, you probably know that this particle is special because it can explain how fundamental particles acquire mass.

So it's finally, probably, maybe, happened. Although they are still hedging a bit, physicists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, announced this morning that they had found the long-sought Higgs boson.

SSC site “Europe Overtakes U.S. in Physics Pursuing God Particle,” the headline blared.The Bloomberg News story declared that the home of Galileo and Newton has recaptured the lead in physics with its pursuit of the Higgs boson, a place in the scientific firmament that was once indisputably owned by the birthplace of Benjamin Franklin.

The 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics goes to François Englert and Peter Higgs for the theory of how particles acquire mass, requiring the existence of the Higgs Boson, experimentally confirmed to exist in 2012

October 8, 2013 — Steve Mirsky

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Evidence for a new particle that was detected at the Large Hadron Collider was confirmed in 2012 to be the fabled Higgs. The particle's namesake and another theorist have now received the 2013 Nobel in physics

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