The head of the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) says its teams have discovered a new particle that is consistent with a subatomic particle called the Higgs boson, which has been nicknamed the God particle.
"We have a discovery [that is] consistent with a Higgs boson," Rolf Heuer, director of CERN, said Wednesday. Scientists have been searching for this particle for more than 40 years. English physicist Peter Higgs proposed the boson – that is, a subatomic particle – in the 1960s, saying that this particle is responsible for the size and shape of all matter in the universe.
Two independent teams at CERN, which is located in the Alps on the French-Swiss border, "observed" the new boson, but the teams did not say that they have discovered the Higgs boson specifically.
In tests to find the particle, independent teams make subatomic particles crash into each other on underground tracks by using great amounts of energy. The particles are steered by magnetic fields.
According to an article on Yahoo, “physicists say the Higgs boson would help explain how we, and the rest of the universe, exist. It would explain why the matter created in the Big Bang has mass, and can coalesce. Without it, as CERN explained in a background paper, ‘the universe would be a very different place ... no ordinary matter as we know it, no chemistry, no biology, and no people.’”
A physicist with the Department of Energy’s Fermilab, Rob Roser, said, "The Higgs particle, if it's real, will show itself in different ways. We need for all of them to be consistent before we can say for sure we've seen it. This is one of the cornerstones of how we understand the universe, and if it's not there, we have to go back and check our assumptions about how the universe exists."
Fermilab's had an atom smasher called the Tevatron, but it was shut down last year after CERN unveiled its Large Hadron Collider, which is more powerful. Scientist believe that Tevatron produced thousands of Higgs particles over its lifetime.
"It's up to us to try to find them in the data we have collected," Luciano Ristori, a physicist at Fermilab and the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics, said in a statement earlier this week. "We have developed sophisticated simulation and analysis programs to identify Higgs-like patterns. Still, it is easier to look for a friend's face in a sports stadium filled with 100,000 people than to search for a Higgs-like event among trillions of collisions."
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