Further to our incredible story in iNews Cayman’s July 5^th publication under the title “Higgs boson-like particle discovery claimed at LHC” see: http://www.ieyenews.com/2012/07/higgs-boson-like-particle-discovery-claimed-at-lhc/, our friends at TechRepublic. have published an article by CNET News.com showing the celebratory story, by way of pictures, of the existence of a new particle, which could be the Higgs boson.

We hope you enjoy it.

Celebrating the moment: Peter Higgs congratulated by Francois Englert, from the Free University of Brussels, as researchers gathered at CERN* on July 4, 2012, to hear the results of experiments in the pursuit of the long-sought Higgs boson.

Scientists now believe there are strong indications pointing to the existence of a new particle, which could be the Higgs.

More data will be needed before researchers can be certain that the particle they’ve discovered is the elusive Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model. That’s the theory that describes how all particles interact.

Though the results are preliminary, CERN’s scientists believe the discovery likely heralds a new era in physics.

Scientists offered their conclusions after poring through data gathered from trillions of proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider in 2011 and 2012. This was no mean feat. The LHC accelerated the protons close to the speed of light as they traversed a nearly 5-mile-long ring. In the resulting collisions, the particles created other particles — including, they believe, the Higgs. CERN says it takes about 1 billion collisions to make a single Higgs boson.

 

 

High fives all around, but after the initial wave of excitement, scientists cautioned that there’s more work to do before they can make a positive identification of the new particle’s characteristics. That caveat aside, CERN researchers — and scientists around the world — believe they are closing in on their long-pursued grail. The strong evidence unveiled by CERN suggests that the likelihood that this observation was connected to a statistical fluctuation is less than 1 percent.

 

Professor Peter Higgs published a paper in 1964 predicting the existence of a new particle. Higgs was at CERN on July 4 as researchers disclosed the news of their findings.

 

 

CERN says that next on the agenda is to examine the exact nature of the particle and then reach a conclusion about its significance.

 

 

 

CERN particle physicists use a scale to describe the certainty of a discovery. According to CERN: “1 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.” CERN researchers told the assembled researchers and media that they had found “clear signs” of a new particle, at the level of 5 sigma. By the end of the month, the complete analysis is expected to be published.

For more on this story go to:

www.techrepublic.com/photos/scenes-from-a-celebration-the-higgs-within-reach-pictures/

*CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire), the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, is the world’s leading laboratory for particle physics. It has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its Member States are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Romania is a candidate for accession. Israel and Serbia are Associate Members in the pre-stage to Membership. India, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European Commission and UNESCO have Observer status.

A proton-proton collision event in the CMS experiment producing two high-energy photons (red towers). This is what we would expect to see from the decay of a Higgs boson but it is also consistent with background Standard Model physics processes. © CERN 2012