CERN - Scientists say new particle is Higgs boson

johnsweeting

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Oct 19, 2011
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Some good news today for us that believe in science and care for actual evidence.


Scientists said Wednesday that they had discovered a new particle whose characteristics match those of the Higgs boson, the most sought-after particle in physics, which could help unlock some of the universe's deepest secrets.
"We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature," said Rolf Heuer, the director general of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which has been carrying out experiments in search of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest particle accelerator.
"The discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson opens the way to more detailed studies, requiring larger statistics, which will pin down the new particle's properties, and is likely to shed light on other mysteries of our universe," said Heuer.

Announcements by scientists about their analysis of data generated by trillions of particle collisions in the LHC drew avid applause at an eagerly awaited seminar in Geneva, Switzerland, on Wednesday.
The Swiss presentation comes after researchers in Illinois said earlier this week scientists that they had crept closer to proving that the particle exists but had been unable to reach a definitive conclusion.

Finding the Higgs boson would help explain the origin of mass, one of the open questions in physicists' current understanding of the way the universe works.
The particle has been so difficult to pin down that the physicist Leon Lederman reportedly wanted to call his book "The Goddamn Particle." But he truncated that epithet to "The God Particle," which may have helped elevate the particle's allure in popular culture.
Experts say finding the elusive particle would rank as one of the top scientific achievements of the past 50 years.

The Higgs boson is part of a theory first proposed by physicist Peter Higgs and others in the 1960s to explain how particles obtain mass.

The theory proposes that a so-called Higgs energy field exists everywhere in the universe. As particles zoom around in this field, they interact with and attract Higgs bosons, which cluster around the particles in varying numbers.
Imagine the universe like a party. Relatively unknown guests at the party can pass quickly through the room unnoticed; more popular guests will attract groups of people (the Higgs bosons) who will then slow their movement through the room.
The speed of particles moving through the Higgs field works much in the same way. Certain particles will attract larger clusters of Higgs bosons - and the more Higgs bosons a particle attracts, the greater its mass will be.
 
possum found it once but Granny made him give it back to ol' man Higgs...
:redface:
CERN chief firmer on 'God particle'
Jan 26,`13 -- The world should know with certainty by the middle of this year whether a subatomic particle discovered by scientists is a long-sought Higgs boson, the head of the world's largest atom smasher said Saturday.
Rolf Heuer, director of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, said he is confident that "towards the middle of the year, we will be there." By then, he said reams of data from the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider on the Swiss-French border near Geneva should have been assessed. The timing could also help Scottish physicist Peter Higgs win a Noble Prize, Heuer said in an interview with The Associated Press in the Swiss resort of Davos. CERN's atom smasher helped scientists declare in July their discovery of a new subatomic particle that Heuer calls "very, very like" a Higgs boson, that promises a new realm of understanding the universe.

The machine, which has been creating high-energy collisions of protons to investigate dark matter, antimatter and the creation of the universe, is being put to rest early this year. The data from it, however, takes longer to analyze. "Suppose the Higgs boson is a special snowflake. So you have to identify the snowflake, in a big snowstorm, in front of a background of snowfields," Heuer said by way of analogy. "That is very difficult. You need a tremendous amount of snowfall in order to identify the snowflakes and this is why it takes time."

He said the standard model of particle physics describes only 5 percent of the universe, which many theorize occurred in a massive explosion known as the Big Bang. To explain how subatomic particles, such as electrons, protons and neutrons, were themselves formed, Higgs and others in the 1960s envisioned an energy field where particles interact with a key particle, the Higgs boson. The idea was that other particles attract Higgs bosons and the more they attract, the bigger their mass will be. But a big question remains: Is this new particle a variation of the Higgs boson, or the same as the Higgs boson that was predicted?

The phrase "God particle," coined by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman, is used by laymen, not physicists, more as an explanation for how the subatomic universe works than how it all started. "Now, if there is a deviation in one of the properties of this Higgs boson, that means we open a new window, for example, hopefully into the part of the dark universe, the 95 percent of the unknown universe," said Heuer. "If you find the deviation," he added, "that means if it is not the - but a - Higgs boson, then we might find a fantastic window into the dark universe so we would make another giant leap from the visible to the dark."

Source
 
Granny says dat's good - now dey won't blow up the world...
:redface:
LHC switches off for two-year break
14 February 2013 - The repairs to magnet wiring will occur over the LHC's whole 27km circumference
The Large Hadron Collider has turned off its particle beams ahead of a shut-down period that will last two years. The particle accelerator is best known for identifying a particle believed to be the Higgs boson in late 2012. But following technical faults shortly after it first switched on, the machine has never been run at the full energies for which it was designed. A programme of repairs and upgrades to the accelerator and its infrastructure should allow that in late 2014. The LHC's beams were "dumped" early on Thursday morning, but it will take until Saturday morning for the machine's 1,734 magnets to warm up to room temperature. Then an unprecedented period of upgrade and repair - dubbed "Long Shutdown 1" - will begin.

The machine ran at particle energies of 8 trillion electron-volts (teraelectronvolts; TeV) in 2012, up from the prior high point of 7TeV in 2011. But when the shutdown concludes, slated for the end of November 2014, it should be set to run at 14TeV - far and away the highest-energy collisions ever attempted by scientists. "We have been running successfully, but only at half the maximum energy, because we can only safely run the magnets at half the design current," said Tony Weidberg, a University of Oxford physicist who works on the LHC's Atlas detector.

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The problem has been the connections between the giant magnets that help steer charged particles around the LHC's 27km-long ring. A fault in 2008, just nine days after particle beams first circulated at the LHC, caused what is known as a "quench" in a number of the magnets, in turn resulting in a leak of liquid helium and sparking a repair operation that took more than a year. "After the incident, the long-term plan was to get some running at intermediate energy and then have a long shut-down when we improve the connections between the magnets," Prof Weidberg told BBC News. "That's a major operation, because you have to warm up all these superconducting magnets and go in and do repairs."

But the shut-down schedule also includes upgrades to all four of the LHC's detectors, the shielding of electronics, and even an overhaul of the ventilation system of the tunnel that houses the main accelerator ring. The shut-down is due to conclude in late November 2014. after which the system will be put through its paces and experiments are expected to resume in February or March 2015. In the meantime, scientists will stay busy analysing plenty of data from the 2012 data run, which thanks to improvements to the focusing of the LHC's beams as well as the slightly higher energies, provided more than twice as much data as the 2011 run.

BBC News - LHC switches off for two-year break
 
"Believe in Science". Yeah no Faith goin' on there!

:rofl::rofl::rofl:

Belief is not equal to faith, you dumbass. Belief WITHOUT EVIDENCE is equal to faith, which is the opposite of science, being the pursuit of demonstrable truth which necessitates evidence.
 
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