Has Higgs been really discovered?

by Scientific American

Top physicists have recently reached a frenzy over the announcement that the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva is planning to release what is widely expected to be tantalizing - although no conclusive - evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson, the elementary particle hypothesized to be the origin of the mass of all matter.

Many physicists have already swung into action, swapping rumors about the contents of the announcement and proposing grand ideas about what those rumors would mean, if true. “It’s impossible to be excited enough,” says Gordon Kane, a theoretical physicist at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

The spokespeople of the collaborations using the cathedral-size ATLAS and CMS detectors to search for the Higgs boson and other phenomena at the 27-kilometer-circumference proton accelerator of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are scheduled to present updates based on analyses of the data collected to date. “There won’t be a discovery announcement, but it does promise to be interesting, since there are rumors that scientists have seen hints of the elusive Higgs boson” says James Gillies, spokesperson for CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), which hosts the LHC.

Joe Lykken, a theoretical physicist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill, and a member of the CMS collaboration, says: “Whatever happens eventually with the Higgs, I think we’ll look back on this meeting and say. ‘This was the beginning of something.’” (As a CMS member, Lykken says he is not yet sure himself what results ATLAS would unveil; he is bound by his collaboration’s rules not to reveal what CMS has in hand.)

Available at: <http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57341543-76/has-higgs-been-discovered-rumors--of-watershed-news-build/?tag=mncol;topStories>. Retrieved on: 11 Dec. 2011. Adapted.

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