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God particle may be announced as physicists publish latest data

By Michael Santo on 2011-12-09
LHC

Scientists who have been hunting for the so-called God particle at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland may announce their latest findings as soon as next week.

The search for the elusive subatomic particle named the Higgs boson, also known as the “God particle” may be approaching its finish line, although the CERN Lab in Geneva said that the collider experiments have not accrued enough data to make any conclusive statement on the existence or non-existence of the Higgs boson, an as yet undetected particle thought to give all other particles their mass.

The BBC has leaked information, however, that a highly respected physicist from the CERN particle physics laboratory expects to see 'the first glimpse' of the Higgs boson next week.

The LHC is a 17-mile long underground circular tunnel where particles are smashed into one another at near light speed. The collisions produce enormous amounts of energy, releasing various exotic particles; scientists had been hoping to catch a glimpse of the Higgs boson, but as of November of this year, their search had proved fruitless.

The Higgs boson, which has been theorized but never observed, is thought to give all other particles their mass. Detecting the Higgs boson would be huge, physicists say, because particles with mass are an integral component of the physical world. The particle's ability to explain so much about the universe earned it the moniker of the "God particle."

The particle is thought to have a mass of between 114 and 185 gigaelectronvolts, or GeVs. To put that into perspective, a proton, the positively charged particle in the nucleus of an atom, has a mass of one GeV.

Scientists have observed suggestive data spikes of between 120 and 140 GeVs, which suggest that the Higgs boson lies in that range. Unfortunately, the raw data at the time was not reliable enough to make any scientific claims, and could simply represent statistical glitches, the scientists cautioned. That was back in April. Since then, the teams have been collecting more and more observations of so-called events, when particles collide.

Particle enthusiasts, armchair physicists and professional scientists hope the impending presentation will be a big announcement resulting from a sufficient accumulation of data, though so far CERN is keeping a quiet if that's the case.

Image Source: Wikimedia Commons

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Comments

#1 Sigma

Submitted by Otto Krog (not verified) on 2011-12-09.

Scientists measure their experiments by a term called sigma.

There is no scientific discovery about a sigma 2.5 or 3.00 as probably will be the case on tuesday. Maybe even lower.

If Newton were sitting under his appletree and made 100 observations, and in one instance the apple didn't hit him in the head, it is a sigma 2.5. A sigma 5.o is EVERY time that the apple falls down, and that includes doing it a million times and more.

THAT is a scientific discovery.

At sigma 3 the apple fals wrong one out of every 370 times you do the experiment. That is not a scientific discovery either.

My prediction is that the Higgs particle never will reach close to a sigma 5.

Behind the prediction there is a theory, if you are interested.

Google crestroyer theory and find it or visit directly at

#2 The Silence of Big Bang

Submitted by Anadish Kumar Pal (not verified) on 2011-12-09.

Faster than light Neutrinoes and Higgs both cannot coexist -- either one has to be wrong. It's DCE research and supeluminal speed which has the potential of breaking current scientific barriers, rather than finding a nebulous statistical dual peak for a Higgs, which well could be due to many other anomalies, one that LHC could not decipher is that of the UFOs.