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In 1964 six physicists including Peter Higgs of the University of Edinburgh, Tom Kibble of Imperial College,
London; Carl Hagen of the University of Rochester; Dr. Guralnik of Brown University; and François Englert and Robert Brout, both of Université Libre de Bruxelles developed the theory of the Higgs bosun. The Higgs bosun was conceived as a “manifestation of an invisible force field, a cosmic molasses that permeates space and imbues elementary particles with mass.” But until now no one has been able to show that it really existed.
According to The New York Times scientists at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) have finally discovered a Higgslike particle using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Two teams each comprised of about 3,000 physicists, crunched data from experiments conducted in the LHC and came up with the same particle.
The Atlas team was lead by led by Fabiola Gianotti, the spokes person and coordinator of the experiment. According to CNN, she was democratically elected to that position by the scientists involved.
“We observe in our data clear signs of a new particle, at the level of 5 sigma, in the mass region around 126 GeV. The outstanding performance of the LHC and ATLAS and the huge efforts of many people have brought us to this exciting stage,” said ATLAS experiment spokesperson Fabiola Gianotti, “but a little more time is needed to prepare these results for publication.”
The spokes person for the second team was Joe Incandela, a physicist of the University of California, Santa Barbara.
"The results are preliminary but the 5 sigma signal at around 125 GeV we’re seeing is dramatic. This is indeed a new particle. We know it must be a boson and it’s the heaviest boson ever found,” said CMS experiment spokesperson Joe Incandela. “The implications are very significant and it is precisely for this reason that we must be extremely diligent in all of our studies and cross-checks."
According to CERN: “One sigma means the results could be random fluctuations in the data, 3 sigma counts as an observation and a 5-sigma result is a discovery.” So the fact that both groups reached a 5-sigma result is significant.
While there is still more data to analyze and more experiments to be conducted to determine the precise nature of the particle. For now however, this discovery appears to prove the Standard Model of particle physics. For over forty years, people have been theorizing that the Higgs bosun was an essential ingredient in the model and at least preliminarily, it has been shown to exist.
Now they have to figure out if it is behaving as the Standard Model predicts or is something different occurring? More experiments are needed but for now, for give particle physicists if they decide to party on this news. It isn’t often that elusive particles like the Higgslike particle just discovered are found
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