After the big announcement last year, physicists have made it official.
They have indeed found the Higgs boson:
Physicists announced on July 4, 2012, that, with more than 99 percent
certainty, they had found a new elementary particle weighing about 126
times the mass of the proton that was likely the long-sought Higgs boson.
The Higgs is sometimes referred to as the "God particle,"
to the chagrin of many scientists, who prefer its official name.
But the two experiments, CMS and ATLAS, hadn't collected enough data
to say the particle was, for sure, the Higgs boson, the last undiscovered
piece of the puzzle predicted by the Standard Model, the reigning theory
of particle physics.
Now, after collecting two and a half times more data inside the Large
Hadron Collider (LHC) — where protons zip at near light-speed
around the 17-mile-long (27 kilometer) underground ring beneath Switzerland
and France — physicists say the particle is a Higgs.
Jeanna Bryner of LiveScience has the full story:
Here.
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