Scientists today said that the subatomic particle discovered last year by the large Hadron Collider (lHC) is indeed a Higgs boson or the elusive ‘God particle’ — a key building block of our universe.
It remains an open question, however, whether this is the Higgs boson of the Standard Model of particle physics, or possibly the lightest of several bosons predicted in some theories that go beyond the Standard Model, The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) said.
“The preliminary results with the full 2012 data set are magnificent and to me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson though we still have a long way to go to know what kind of Higgs boson it is,” said CERN physicist Joe Incandela.
At the Moriond Conference in Italy today, the ATlAS and CMS collaborations at the lHC presented preliminary new results that further elucidate the particle discovered last year.
Having analysed two and a half times more data than was available for the discovery announcement in July, they found that the new particle is looking more and more like a Higgs boson, the particle linked to the mechanism that gives mass to elementary particles.