CERN Says It's Detected A New Particle, Likely The Higgs Boson [View all]

[joshcryer]

Source: NPR's News Blog

Teams of scientists using the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, announced in Geneva this morning that they have detected evidence of a new subatomic particle that bears the hallmarks of the elusive and highly sought after Higgs boson. In layman's terms, the Higgs is referred to as the "God Particle" because the field it produces gives atoms its mass. Were it not for the Higgs, the world we know would be completely different — there would be no chemistry, no architecture, no us. It would be a massless mess of aimless particles running around at light speed.

CERN spokesman Joe Incandela said the scientists had observed a new particle, but he stopped short of saying it was indeed the Higgs boson. That is the likely conclusion.

"We have quite strong evidence that there's something there. Its properties are still going to take us a little bit of time," Incandela said in a video accidentally released on Tuesday by CERN. "This is the most massive such particle that exists, if we confirm all this, which I think we will ... It's something that may, in the end, be one of the biggest observations of any new phenomena in our field in the last 30 or 40 years, going way back to the discovery of quarks"

To make the observations, scientists at the LHC sent particles crashing at tremendous speeds to try to create Higgs. Then, because the particle only exists for a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second, scientists looked for its signature decay. The scientists said they had detected what are likely Higgs trails — a bump in their data — with a great degree of certainty.

Read more: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/07/04/156221787/cern-says-its-detected-a-new-particle-likely-the-higgs-boson

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This was one of the better sources for this that I found, a bunch of others weren't as official sounding, I hope as a "blog" it is allowed. There are quite a few other sources for this, mostly blogs as of this posting.