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In July last year, scientists, nerds and humanists all celebrated as one at what looked likely to be the discovery of the Higgs Boson. Or at least, the discovery of data that seemed to suggest the Higgs Boson had a shadow and we might have seen it. Since then a lot more data has been analysed and CERN is now much more confident that indeed last year's Large Hadron Collider run did discover the Higgs Boson.
According to a release by CERN, the research facility that houses the LHC and a couple thousand insanely smart individuals, over 2.5 times more data has now been analysed and it's now not really a question of whether it was the Higgs that was recorded, but what type. “The preliminary results with the full 2012 data set are magnificent and to me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson though we still have a long way to go to know what kind of Higgs boson it is,” said Joe Incandela, a spokesperson at CERN.
Yes apparently there could be more than one type: the standard Higgs as we've come to know it or one of several different types, as predicted by other scientific theories. The monotheist scientists among you may think that more than one type of god particle is pure blasphemy, but the argument is there nonetheless.
However the general consensus seems to be that it's probably the “standard” Higgs, since the results show a particle that has no spin and a positive parity – and this is exactly how the Higgs is postulated to behave.
“The beautiful new results represent a huge effort by many dedicated people. They point to the new particle having the spin-parity of a Higgs boson as in the Standard Model. We are now well started on the measurement programme in the Higgs sector,” says ATLAS spokesperson Dave Charlton.
The Higgs Boson came into theoretical existence in 1964, when Peter Higgs and six other physicists proposed the mechanism that suggested such a particle.
KitGuru Says: This is exciting stuff. Its like looking through a super microscope crossed with a time machine.
hi there!
Boson is the correct term, Bosun is an officer at sea! Sorry ! didn’t want to be “that guy”
But thought you should know!
*runs away*
41 years back, I opened a letter that told me I’d been granted a scholarship at Bristol Grammar School; the same post also brought a letter offering me a place at Cotham Grammar (Cotham’s the area within Bristol where I lived). I regarded getting into the first as success, and the second as no more than a safety net. (What’s this idiot talking about????!!!) Cotham Grammar’s where Paul Dirac was educated. AND where Higgs went to school. It seems set to be the first secondary school to produce not one but TWO Physics Nobel Laureates. Curiously, Bristol already celebrates the name of one of its famous scientific children by naming a school after him…. but it’s Sir Bernard Lovell’s name they celebrate, not Higgs’ OR Dirac’s.