The Nobel Prize-winning discovery of the Higgs boson - the "God particle" believed responsible for all the mass in the universe - took place in 2012 at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, an underground facility where accelerated sub-atomic particles zip around the circumference of a 27-kilometer (16.9-mile) ring-shaped tunnel. But what goes around comes around: more than 50 years ago, the first hint of Higgs was inspired by the study of superconductors - a special class of metals that, when cooled to very low temperatures, allow electrons to move without resistance.
Now, a research team led by Israeli and German physicists has closed a circle, by reporting the first-ever observations of the Higgs mode in superconducting materials.
Unlike the mega-expensive sub-atomic smashups at CERN - a facility that cost about $4.75 billion to build - these findings, presented in the prestigious scientific journal Nature Physics, were achieved through experiments conducted in a regular laboratory at relatively low cost.
Whoops... So much for Big $cience. ;-) To read more, click here.