Have they found the Higgs boson? Nearly...
Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider raise hopes that 'God particle' will be found in 2012
AFTER days of hype, we finally know: scientists have not discovered the Higgs boson. However, physicists at the Cern laboratory in Switzerland have presented the first experimental evidence that the particle that imparts mass to everything in the universe might exist - and offered a better idea of where to look for it.
There are two teams of scientists using Cern's Large Hadron Collider to look for the Higgs boson: Atlas and CMS. They have studied trillions of particle collisions in their search for a particle that is the 'missing link' in the Standard Model, a theory in physics that describes how subatomic particles interact.
The scientists are not sure of the Higgs's mass, so they have been looking across a broad range of between 114 gigaelectronvolts (GeV) and 141GeV, reports Nature.
Atlas today said they had found a spike in their data around 125-126GeV with a statistical level of 3.6 standard deviations. A statistical level of three standard deviations is considered to be evidence that a particle might exist. For an actual discovery to be declared, this would have had to be five standard deviations.
The CMS team, meanwhile, found a 124GeV spike of 2.6 standard deviations.
Complicating the situation a little is another signal seen by both teams around 119GeV.
So, the most we have at the moment is evidence the Higgs boson particle exists and a better idea of where to look for it. The Atlas and CMS teams will now perform trillions more collisions in an effort to hunt down the Higgs boson in 2012. Bill Murray of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford says: "Next year's data should answer [the question of the Higgs's existence] without question." ·
