Higgs discovery

The discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson has been announced by physicists from the Large Hadron Collider’s CMS and ATLAS detectors.

The discovery was detailed at a major conference to update the world on the continuing efforts by CERN scientists to find the last remaining piece of the Standard Model that underpins the foundations of our Universe. The Higgs boson mediates the “Higgs field” that ultimately endows all matter with mass — finding the Higgs is therefore imperative for physicists to understand what gives the Universe substance.

“We have observed a new boson.” – Joe Incandela, CMS lead physicist

When reports first surfaced that Peter Higgs — one of the six physicists who, in the 1960s, developed the theory behind Higgs boson — had been invited to CERN for this morning’s announcement, the event became hard to ignore: something historic was about to happen.

And sure enough, at 9 a.m. in Geneva, Switzerland (3 a.m. EST), the news we had all been waiting for was spelled out by Joe Incandela, lead scientist of the CMS experiment: “We have observed a new boson.”

This “new boson” revealed itself in the CMS data as a “bump” at 125 GeV/c2, a value that places it at over 130 times more massive than a proton.

After combining all the results gathered over many different channels in the CMS, the level of certainty — 4.9-sigma — came tantalizingly close to the “Gold Standard” (5-sigma) for subatomic particle discovery. This means there is a one-in-2 million chance of the result being a random fluctuation, or noise. For all intents and purposes, this is a discovery of a particle that acts very much like a Higgs boson.

“This is very preliminary result, but it’s very strong, ” added Incandela.

Following the CMS announcement, ATLAS’ Fabiola Gianotti said: “We observe in our data clear signs of a new particle, at the level of five sigma, in the mass region around 126 GeV.” A 5-sigma result represents a one-in-3.5 million chance of the result being noise. This is undeniable proof that a boson, with very Higgs-like qualities, has been discovered by the two detectors.