Physicists are on tenterhooks as the team at the Large Hadron Collider get ready for a historic announcement. Anjana Ahuja reports.
Tomorrow could see one of the most anticipated moments in the history of modern science. In a packed auditorium, scientists at Cern, the European nuclear research institute which operates the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), will reveal the latest findings in their hunt for the Higgs boson.
If they really have found the Higgs, as rumours suggest, this would be a triumph for physics – not merely by providing a finishing touch to the Standard Model, which is the dominant theory of how the universe works at the subatomic level, but by solving the long-standing mystery of why objects have mass, and why some have more than others.
During the decades of Higgs hunting, there have been many false dawns. What makes tomorrow's announcement different is primarily its timing. The seminar coincides with the opening of the 36th International Conference on High Energy Physics in Melbourne. This features updated results from two separate experiments at the LHC, which, in December, were showing tantalising glimpses of a Higgs-like particle. The Daily Telegraph has learnt that four out of the five surviving theorists involved in predicting the Higgs boson have chosen to attend the announcement, three in Geneva and one at an event in Westminster.
Cern has always insisted that if and when the Higgs is confirmed, the announcement will be made at its HQ in Geneva. The 16-mile-long LHC, which sits in a tunnel under the Franco-Swiss border, smashes atoms together at almost the speed of light, pulverising them into subatomic debris. The Higgs boson is predicted to emerge fleetingly amid this chaos, existing for less than a trillionth of a second before decaying into other particles, leaving behind only a ghostly signal.
During the past few months, since the LHC was switched back on after a winter refit, scientists have amassed more data than during the whole of 2011, allowing them to check whether the flashes they have observed were random, unimportant fluctuations or the genuine signature of the so-called "God particle".
Particularly exciting was the detection in December of a weak signal – at an energy of 125 gigaelectronvolts (GeV), exactly where the Higgs had been predicted to lurk – that created a global stir and a sense of expectation ahead of the Melbourne conference. Professor Tom Kibble of Imperial College London, one of the six theorists credited with predicting the particle's existence, is certainly expecting confirmation: "Cern are making an awful lot of fuss, so if [the Higgs] isn't announced it would be rather an anticlimax," he says. In an added dramatic twist, scientists at Fermilab, Cern's Illinois-based rival whose Tevatron collider shut down last year due to budget cuts, moved to unveil their own Higgs results yesterday evening, in a suspected spoiler...
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Tomorrow could see one of the most anticipated moments in the history of modern science. In a packed auditorium, scientists at Cern, the European nuclear research institute which operates the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), will reveal the latest findings in their hunt for the Higgs boson.
If they really have found the Higgs, as rumours suggest, this would be a triumph for physics – not merely by providing a finishing touch to the Standard Model, which is the dominant theory of how the universe works at the subatomic level, but by solving the long-standing mystery of why objects have mass, and why some have more than others.
During the decades of Higgs hunting, there have been many false dawns. What makes tomorrow's announcement different is primarily its timing. The seminar coincides with the opening of the 36th International Conference on High Energy Physics in Melbourne. This features updated results from two separate experiments at the LHC, which, in December, were showing tantalising glimpses of a Higgs-like particle. The Daily Telegraph has learnt that four out of the five surviving theorists involved in predicting the Higgs boson have chosen to attend the announcement, three in Geneva and one at an event in Westminster.
Cern has always insisted that if and when the Higgs is confirmed, the announcement will be made at its HQ in Geneva. The 16-mile-long LHC, which sits in a tunnel under the Franco-Swiss border, smashes atoms together at almost the speed of light, pulverising them into subatomic debris. The Higgs boson is predicted to emerge fleetingly amid this chaos, existing for less than a trillionth of a second before decaying into other particles, leaving behind only a ghostly signal.
During the past few months, since the LHC was switched back on after a winter refit, scientists have amassed more data than during the whole of 2011, allowing them to check whether the flashes they have observed were random, unimportant fluctuations or the genuine signature of the so-called "God particle".
Particularly exciting was the detection in December of a weak signal – at an energy of 125 gigaelectronvolts (GeV), exactly where the Higgs had been predicted to lurk – that created a global stir and a sense of expectation ahead of the Melbourne conference. Professor Tom Kibble of Imperial College London, one of the six theorists credited with predicting the particle's existence, is certainly expecting confirmation: "Cern are making an awful lot of fuss, so if [the Higgs] isn't announced it would be rather an anticlimax," he says. In an added dramatic twist, scientists at Fermilab, Cern's Illinois-based rival whose Tevatron collider shut down last year due to budget cuts, moved to unveil their own Higgs results yesterday evening, in a suspected spoiler...
http://news360.com/article/59088495
Shared via News360 for Windows Phone 7. Learn more at http://news360app.com.
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