CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, reported July 4:
The ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN today presented their latest results in the search for the long-sought Higgs boson. Both experiments see strong indications for the presence of a new particle, which could be the Higgs boson, in the mass region around 126 gigaelectronvolts (GeV).
The experiments found hints of the new particle by analysing trillions of proton-proton collisions from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2011 and 2012. The Standard Model of particle physics predicts that a Higgs boson would decay into different particles – which the LHC experiments then detect.
Reuters reported:
Scientists at Europe's CERN research center have found a new subatomic particle, a basic building block of the universe, which appears to be the boson imagined and named half a century ago by theoretical physicist Peter Higgs.
"We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature," CERN director general Rolf Heuer told a gathering of scientists and the world's media near Geneva on Wednesday.
"The discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson opens the way to more detailed studies, requiring larger statistics, which will pin down the new particle's properties, and is likely to shed light on other mysteries of our universe."
Two independent studies of data produced by smashing proton particles together at CERN's Large Hadron Collider produced a convergent near-certainty on the existence of the new particle.
It is unclear that it is exactly the boson Higgs foresaw, which by bestowing mass on other matter helps explain the way the universe was ordered after the chaos of Big Bang.
In DDC bosons are classed in 539.721 Specific kinds of subatomic particles, which has the including note: "Including bosons . . . ." The LCSH "Bosons" and "Higgs bosons" are both mapped to 539.721.
Examples of works about bosons classed in 539.721 Specific kinds of subatomic particles are The Large Hadron Collider and Higgs Boson Research and Massive: The Missing Particle that Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science.
For discussion of the Large Hadron Collider itself, see previous blog postings (2007 and 2008).
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