Long-sought 'God Particle' cornered, scientists say
News is not the final answer some were hoping for, but progress is significant step
By Clara Moskowitz
2011-12-13T14:39:07
Physicists are closer than ever to hunting down the elusive Higgs boson particle, the missing piece of the governing theory of the universe's tiniest building blocks.
Scientists at the world's largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland, announced today (Dec. 13) that they'd narrowed down the list of possible hiding spots for the Higgs, (also called the God particle) and even see some indications that they're hot on its trail.
"I think we are getting very close," said Vivek Sharma, a physicist at the University of California, San Diego, and the leader of the Higgs search at LHC's CMS experiment. "We may be getting the first tantalizing hints, but it's a whiff, it's a smell, it's not quite the whole thing."
A typical candidate event at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), including
two high-energy photons whose energy (depicted by red towers) is measured
in the CMS electromagnetic calorimeter. The yellow lines are the measured
tracks of other particles produced in the collision. The pale blue volume
shows the CMS crystal calorimeter barrel.
Full story: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45653534/ns/technology_and_science-science/
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