The result is not definitive evidence of the long-sought Higgs boson — yet. But it is the closest so far to come out of the US$6.5-billion Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe’s high-energy physics laboratory near Geneva in Switzerland. On 13 December, physicists on the LHC’s two largest experiments announced signals consistent with the possible appearance of the Higgs boson, a manifestation of the force field that endows all other particles with mass. If supported by further data, the results suggest a Higgs particle with a mass of about 125 gigaelectronvolts (GeV). But members of both experiments emphasize that the latest data are also statistically consistent with the particle’s absence.
“We have not collected enough evidence for a discovery. There is an excess of events compatible with the hypothesis that it could be a Higgs,” says Guido Tonelli, spokesman for the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment. His sentiment was echoed by Fabiola Gianotti?, spokeswoman for the LHC’s ATLAS experiment. “It could well be something intriguing, but it could be a background fluctuation,” she says.
To read more, click here.