Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Higgs Boson 2: Boson Harder


And another one. From the horse's mouth, so to speak. 

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the physicists at CERN... still haven't found the Higgs boson. But they're damn close. 


Here's what the announcement was about. Being a project of gigantic proportions, the Large Hadron Collider has many, many teams of scientists working on each project. Finding the Higgs boson is only one of the many things being researched, though certainly one of the most important. 

Like antimatter studies. Antimatter is awesome
Two research projects, ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS) and CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid experiments), both found very similar traces of a particle around the same size that physicists expect the Higgs boson to be. To be clear, the Higgs boson is huge, theoretically carrying about 125 GeV. For a comparison, a proton is only around .938 GeV, meaning that the Higgs is over 130x bigger. This amount of energy in one particle means that it is only visible when a collision can produce effects of that magnitude. Lucky for us, the LHC is (theoretically) able to provide this amount of power. 

And, also lucky for us, this theory is paying off. The only reason that these trace findings haven't been labeled 'discoveries' is because of the level of scientific uncertainty behind them. In the world of physics, a discovery must be over 5 sigma on a normal distribution of certainty, meaning that scientists are virtually 100% agreed on the finding. ATLAS registered a confidence level of 2.3 sigma, or 97.8%; CMS cited 1.9 sigma, or a little over 94%. Obviously, these values are great for mere mortals, but not quite up to par for the scientists at CERN. 

Physics: Doesn't fool around. Picture not related.  
So, for now, we are relegated to waiting for the next word from CERN about the one particle that could bring it all together, physically speaking. But wait we will. 

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