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Stronger evidence of Higgs boson

Nicola Mawson
By Nicola Mawson, Contributor.
Johannesburg, 06 Aug 2012

The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) has analysed further data that increases the chances that a recently-discovered particle is the elusive Higgs boson.

Last month, the organisation announced it had found a particle, which behaves like the Higgs boson. The Higgs particle is the missing piece of the Standard Model of Physics, which is a set of rules that sets out the fundamental building blocks of the universe, such as protons, electrons and atoms.

The July announcement came in a progress report from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the £2.6 billion “Big Bang” particle accelerator at the centre of the hunt for the Higgs boson. The LHC has been dubbed the world's largest experiment and is housed at CERN in Switzerland.

This month, the Atlas and CMS experiments submitted papers to the Physics Letters B journal, which outline even stronger evidence for the presence of a new Higgs-like particle than announced on 4 July.

Initially, the experiments showed a statistical level of sigma 5, which meant the particle had passed a level of certainty that allowed it to be declared as a discovery. The latest data from CMS is sigma 5, while Atlas recorded 5.9 sigma, which equates to a one-in-550 million chance that the boson is not the Higgs particle.

The Higgs particle - or boson - is named after Peter Higgs, who was one of six authors who theorised about the existence of the particle in the 1960s. It is commonly called the “God Particle”, after the title of Nobel physicist Leon Lederman's “The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?” (1993), according to Wikipedia.

University of Johannesburg professor Simon Connell, from the Department of Physics, who contributed to the find, explains that the statistical significance of the particle being the elusive Higgs boson has increased.

Connell says the scientists analysed further data around how the particle behaves. The current drive is to pin down its physical properties to increase the certainty, he adds.

The discovery of a Higgs-like particle through the research projects has been hailed as heralding a new dawn for science that will spur decades' worth of research into the universe's dark matter and dark energy.

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