The Higgs boson: CERN's quest to discover the elusive God particle
The Large Hadron Collider, a series of tunnels constructed deep underground on the Swiss-French border, is playing host to perhaps the most dramatic piece of scientific research of our era: the search for the Higgs boson particle. Operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the LHC is the world's most advanced particle accelerator, and all the effort and investment into it has recently paid off, at least in part. On July 4th 2012, the CERN team announced that they have discovered a particle "consistent with" their expectation for what the Higgs boson should be, bringing us closer to the ultimate goal of better understanding the composition of all matter.
Science
The Large Hadron Collider and processing data at a million gigabytes per second
Using the Large Hadron Collider, CERN recently discovered a particle consistent with the Higgs boson, but preliminary results are far from conclusive. ITNews sat down with David Foster, CERN's deputy head of IT, to discuss what it takes to calculate the massive amounts of data associated with such experiments and how the organization is planning for the future. With each collision, raw data is filtered through thousands of machines at CERN's data center at a mind-boggling speed of a petabyte...
Culture
Large Hadron Collider's secrets revealed in dramatic photo set
In a special photographic feature yesterday, The Atlantic published 34 pictures showing the construction of the Large Hadron Collider, the massive particle accelerator that made this week's discovery possible. It's a dramatic set — aside from our favorite above, which shows the interior of the LHC, there are detailed photographs of the individual parts and of the computing grid that processes the results. It's been a heavy few days for CERN-centric news, but this is one feature that's...
Culture
What is the Higgs boson?
Since the discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson yesterday, a lot of people have been trying to work out what exactly it is. Scientists at CERN presented their findings in a highly technical presentation — despite being written in Comic Sans, it went over the heads of much of the assembled scientific press, not to mention the thousands of amateurs following the announcement via Twitter and the livestream. Thankfully, experts around the world and across the internet have...
Science
Stephen Hawking on how the Higgs boson discovery cost him $100
This morning scientists at CERN announced that they had indeed discovered a new particle that appears to be consistent with the Standard Model Higgs boson. The BBC spoke with physicist Stephen Hawking, who described the implications of the finding — while also mentioning a losing wager he'd placed on whether the particle would be found. Check out the video below to see one of our greatest minds discuss an incredible discovery.
CERN scientists inexplicably present Higgs boson findings in Comic Sans
For many of us, the most shocking revelation to come out of CERN's Higgs boson announcement today was quite unrelated to the science itself. Rather, we were blown away by the fact that a team made up of some of the most undoubtedly brilliant people in the world believe that Comic Sans is an appropriate font for such a historic occasion.
@ProfBrianCox what's with the shit slides! Where is Alice?
— Vincent Connare (@VincentConnare) July 4, 2012
While criticizing the...
CERN announces discovery of new particle consistent with Higgs boson
Scientists at CERN say they've found a new particle consistent with the Standard Model Higgs boson with 5-sigma certainty — a false positive probability of about 1 in 9 trillion. Evidence of the particle's existence in the 126GeV mass range was gleaned from the CMS (video below) and ATLAS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva. CMS spokesperson Joe Incandela explains, "this is indeed a new particle. We know it must be a boson and it’s the heaviest boson ever found."
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Watch this: CERN now broadcasting update on Higgs boson live
CERN is holding a seminar to update the world on the progress it has made searching for the elusive Higgs boson. Experiments have been conducted with the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator at CERN's labs in Switzerland since 2008, and rumors are flying that the hypothesized Higgs boson may finally have been tracked down. If so, it would all but confirm the validity of the Standard Model of physics. CERN has information about the event at its website, or you can watch the stream live...
CERN confirms its mistake, neutrinos obey the speed limit of light after all
CERN has confirmed that the anomalous results which indicated that neutrinos traveled faster than the speed of light were caused by faulty machinery. The findings were reported on heavily last September, and since then scientists the world over have been trying to explain how the neutrinos broke one of the fundamental laws of physics. Earlier this year, there was word that the team behind the results had found possible faults in its test equipment, and the error has now been confirmed.
While...
Physicist depicts Large Hadron Collider in da Vinci-style sketches
Leonardo da Vinci didn't invent the Large Hadron Collider, but if he had, this is what his sketches may have looked like. These drawings are the work of Dr. Sergio Cittolin, a research physicist who's been at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) for more than 30 years. A lifelong doodler, Cittolin is in charge of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the LHC, and was inspired to compose his da Vinci-style sketches years before collider operations became a reality. His...
Large Hadron Collider turned on again, reaches record energy levels
For the first time in 2012, scientists have turned on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland. Two stable proton beams were collided at four different observation points in the LHC for the experiment, and the team at CERN cranked up the energy of each beam to 4 teraelectronvolts (TeV). The resultant collision set a new world record of 8 TeV of collision energy — levels which should help extend current research. As CERN's Steve Myers explains, scientists had felt safe to crank up the...
Quick read
Find the Higgs Boson in 'Ms. Particle-Man' for iOS and browsers
We may not be any closer to conclusively finding the elusive Higgs Boson, but Michael Falk's Ms. Particle-Man gives you a chance to look for it in the form of a retro iOS and browser title. The titular bow-adorned character must make it through three different colliders, collecting energy and battling the lepton, gluon, and quark "boss particles." Gameplay is challenging, unforgiving, and quite satisfying. It's $0.99 on the App Store, but you can head over here to play it for free with the...
Quick read
Would a Higgs boson by any other name be as elementary?
As is often the case with scientific discoveries, the Higgs boson particle was actually the subject of concurrent research by multiple scientists. io9 points out that in 1964, when Peter Higgs published his famous paper, at least five other scientists were on the same track, some of whom believed they had better scientific grounds for postulating the particle's existence. Now that the particle's name has been cemented in the public's consciousness, it's unlikely that it will get renamed to...
Faster-than-light neutrinos may not be so fast after all
A lot of scientists have been working hard to debunk faster-than-light neutrinos, but it looks like we might not need them after all — the group behind the initial experiment has found two problems that could have affected its results. Initially, the OPERA team gained prominence for finding its neutrinos at CERN traveled 60 nanoseconds faster than light would have over an equivalent distance. The two problems the researchers are reporting would affect the experiment in opposing ways. On the...
Large Hadron Collider's ATLAS experiment reconstructed in Lego
It's not quite a do-it-yourself particle accelerator for the home, but as part of an outreach project at the Niels Bohr Institute, Physics postdoc Sascha Hehlhase has assembled a stunning model of ATLAS, one of the ongoing experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, entirely out of Lego bricks. The attention to detail is quite impressive, capturing the "muon and magnet system to the innermost pixel detector." Hehlhase breaks down his work by the numbers: about 9,500 pieces, 1 x .5 x .5m in size...
LHC discovers first particle since opening: the Chi-b (3P) boson
It's not the Higgs, but the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has discovered a new boson by the name Chi-b (3P). As explained to the BBC, the new particle is a more excited state of Chi particles already observed during collisions, and is comprised of "beauty quark" and a "beauty anti-quark" bound together. Although the excited state had been theorized by the Standard Model of particle physics, it had not been observed until now. The discovery helps complete our understanding of the universe and is...
Higgs boson 'glimpsed' but evidence not conclusive
On Tuesday, teams working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland are expected to present evidence that the Higgs boson particle has been glimpsed. However, the evidence will not be conclusive according to an email sent to staff by Rolf-Dieter Heuer, CERN's director-general. University of Manchester professor Stefan Soldner-Rembold, calls the quality of LHC's results "exceptional" but cautions that we'll likely have to wait less than a year to find out if the Higgs particle has been...
