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God Particle: `Preliminary but strong results`
One of science`s greatest mysteries may be over. The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) is currently holding a press briefing amid speculation it will confirm the discovery of Higgs boson.
Zeenews Bureau
Geneva: One of science’s greatest mysteries may be over. The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) is currently holding a press briefing amid speculation it will confirm the discovery of Higgs boson.
At the venue of the Higgs seminar, the room is full with the first row being occupied by physicists from Princeton and Cornell universities - they arrived at 10:45 last night!
Joseph Incandela of the University of California Santa Barbara is speaking first, to be followed by CERN’s Dr Fabiola Gianotti and Rolf Heuer.
Incandela spoke of preliminary but strong results.
"Focus was on five decay modes of Higgs. LHC performance this year was awesome," he said.
Interestingly, a video ‘mistakenly’ posted on its CERN website shows Joseph Incandela confirming that elusive Higgs boson particle has been discovered. "We`ve observed a new particle… We have quite strong evidence that there`s something there. Its properties are still going to take us a little bit of time, but we can see that it decays to two photons, which tells us it`s a boson," Joe Incandela, spokesman for the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, says in the video, dated July 4 2012.
"This is the most massive such particle that exists, if we confirm all of this - which I think we will."
"It may in the end be one of the biggest discoveries, or observations, of any new phenomenon that we`ve had in our field in the last 30 or 40 years," says Incandela.
The video was available to the public for a brief period of time and now exists in a password-protected part of the website. The elusive Higgs boson or the "God Particle" is considered the last ingredient to the standard model of particle physics that may solve the fundamental questions about the formation of the universe. Higgs boson gives the particles that make up atoms their mass. Scientists have been hunting for it for almost 50 years.
Without this mass, these particles would zip though the cosmos at the speed of light, unable to bind together to form the atoms that make up everything in the universe, from planets to people.
As per reports, five leading theoretical physicists have been invited to its next update in Geneva on the subatomic particle search, sparking speculation that the particle has been discovered.
The Large Hadron Collider, housed in an 18-mile tunnel buried deep underground near the French-Swiss border, smashes beams of protons -- sub-atomic particles -- together at close to the speed of light, recreating the conditions that existed a fraction of a second after the Big Bang.
If the physicists` theory is correct, a few Higgs bosons should be created in every trillion collisions, before rapidly decaying. This decay would leave behind a "footprint" that would show up as a bump in their graphs.
However, despite 1,600 trillion collisions being created in the tunnel, there have been fewer than 300 potential Higgs particles.
Geneva: One of science’s greatest mysteries may be over. The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) is currently holding a press briefing amid speculation it will confirm the discovery of Higgs boson.
At the venue of the Higgs seminar, the room is full with the first row being occupied by physicists from Princeton and Cornell universities - they arrived at 10:45 last night!
Joseph Incandela of the University of California Santa Barbara is speaking first, to be followed by CERN’s Dr Fabiola Gianotti and Rolf Heuer.
Incandela spoke of preliminary but strong results.
"Focus was on five decay modes of Higgs. LHC performance this year was awesome," he said.
Interestingly, a video ‘mistakenly’ posted on its CERN website shows Joseph Incandela confirming that elusive Higgs boson particle has been discovered. "We`ve observed a new particle… We have quite strong evidence that there`s something there. Its properties are still going to take us a little bit of time, but we can see that it decays to two photons, which tells us it`s a boson," Joe Incandela, spokesman for the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, says in the video, dated July 4 2012.
"This is the most massive such particle that exists, if we confirm all of this - which I think we will."
"It may in the end be one of the biggest discoveries, or observations, of any new phenomenon that we`ve had in our field in the last 30 or 40 years," says Incandela.
The video was available to the public for a brief period of time and now exists in a password-protected part of the website. The elusive Higgs boson or the "God Particle" is considered the last ingredient to the standard model of particle physics that may solve the fundamental questions about the formation of the universe. Higgs boson gives the particles that make up atoms their mass. Scientists have been hunting for it for almost 50 years.
Without this mass, these particles would zip though the cosmos at the speed of light, unable to bind together to form the atoms that make up everything in the universe, from planets to people.
As per reports, five leading theoretical physicists have been invited to its next update in Geneva on the subatomic particle search, sparking speculation that the particle has been discovered.
The Large Hadron Collider, housed in an 18-mile tunnel buried deep underground near the French-Swiss border, smashes beams of protons -- sub-atomic particles -- together at close to the speed of light, recreating the conditions that existed a fraction of a second after the Big Bang.
If the physicists` theory is correct, a few Higgs bosons should be created in every trillion collisions, before rapidly decaying. This decay would leave behind a "footprint" that would show up as a bump in their graphs.
However, despite 1,600 trillion collisions being created in the tunnel, there have been fewer than 300 potential Higgs particles.