CERN announced today that it had almost, but not quite, found the Higgs Boson, a subatomic particle that gives objects mass.
Two experimental teams reported that they had seen evidence of the particle between 115 and 130 gigaelectron volts (for comparison, a proton's mass is just under 1 GeV); but they didn't yet have enough evidence to declare definitively that they had found the Higgs.
So why all the excitement, for what sounds like no result at all?
It's because particle physics is a game of statistics, and even a non-conclusive result can be pretty interesting. Protons are slammed into each other at close to light speed in the detectors that are dotted along the 27 kilometer circumference of the Large Hadron Collider, located outside Geneva.
These house-sized detectors capture the sub-atomic debris radiating out from hundreds of millions of collisions per second. Not surprisingly, the data is messy, and finding even a single collision that produces the signature of a rare event amidst this debris, such the one expected when a Higgs particle is created and decays into other particles, requires sifting through many terabytes of data. Because something that looks like the signature of the Higgs could also be produced randomly by the debris, multiple observations must be made, with each detected event contributing to the so-called confidence level of the reported results.
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