This might just be what we have been waiting for. As soon as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) revved up its supercooled electromagnets in 2008. There are rumors that an official confirmation of the discovery of one of the Universe’s most secretive particles — the Higgs boson might be conveyed anytime soon and even today! According to PhysicsWorld.com, CERN’s Scientific Policy Committee will be meeting on Tuesday (Dec. 13) to discuss, amongst other things, an update on the search for the Higgs boson. Teams from the LHC’s ATLAS and CMS experiments will be in attendance.
Interestingly the head scientists of the two groups will be there to give the Higgs update. According to comments left on a number of particle physics blogs, the word is that the LHC is closing in on the Higgs. The Higgs boson is theorized to be the “force carrier” of the Higgs field — a field thought to permeate the entire Universe, endowing matter with mass. Only by using powerful particle accelerators like the LHC do we stand a chance of seeing these mysterious particles.
Apparently, both the ATLAS and CMS experiments are independently seeing a Higgs signal, and the predicted mass of the particle agrees with the experimental results. In particle physics-speak, the Higgs appears to have a mass of 125 GeV (gigaelectronvolts). The upshot is that if this is proven, one of physics’ bedrock theories — the Standard Model — is holding steady. If the Higgs does exist with this mass, then perhaps some more tricky Universal mysteries can be resolved.
In an internal email, Rolf Heuer, director-general of CERN, attempted to manage the spiraling rumors by saying, “These results will be based on the analysis of considerably more data than those presented at the Summer conferences, sufficient to make significant progress in the search for the Higgs boson, but not enough to make any conclusive statement on the existence or non-existence of the Higgs.”
Lets keep our fingers crossed and we will stay on this for you!
via Source
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