CERN scientists may have seen Higgs boson on 7-22-2011

William Atkins
Monday, 25 July 2011 22:26

Science - Energy

The Higgs boson is being diligently tracked down at the European particle physics laboratory called the Large Hadron Collider. On Friday, the LHC researchers announced they saw some funny looking bumps in their data that might be a sign of the particle.

 

On Friday, July 22, 2011, the European scientists working at CERN made their announcement about the Higgs boson at the 2011 Europhysics Conference on High-Energy Physics (EPS-HEP 2011), being held from July 21 to 27, 2011, at Grenoble, Rhone-Alpes France.

The Higgs boson might have been seen on that Friday while two independent teams at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), specifically at the Atlas and CMS detectors, were performing experiments.

For more on the story, please read 7-22-2011 The Guardian article 'Cern scientists suspect glimpse of Higgs boson.'

The article quotes Fabiola Fianotti, a spokesperson for the Atlas team. Fianotti states 'We cannot say anything today, but clearly it's intriguing.'

The article adds, 'She said the picture would become clearer as the groups gathered more data and combined results in the next few months."

And, "The view was shared by Guido Tonelli, spokesman for the CMS group, said more data was needed to understand whether the bumps were due to 'statistical fluctuations or possible hints of a signal'.'