Higgs Boson

Jeanna Bryner, LiveScience Managing Editor

Date: 14 March 2013 Time: 08:01 AM ET

Confirmed! Newfound Particle Is a Higgs Boson

Digsby IM, Email, and Social Networks in one easy to use application! http://digsby.com

The mass of the Higgs boson particle, possibly uncovered at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, may mean doom for our universe. Here, proton-proton collisions at the LHC showing events consistent with the Higgs. CREDIT: CERN/CMS/Taylor, L; McCauley, T  View full size image

A newfound particle discovered at the world's largest atom smasher last year is, indeed, a Higgs boson, the particle thought to explain how other particles get their mass, scientists reported today (March 14) at the annual Rencontres de Moriond conference in Italy.

Physicists announced on July 4, 2012, that, with more than 99 percent certainty, they had found a new elementary particle weighing about 126 times the mass of the proton that was likely the long-soughtHiggs boson. The Higgs is sometimes referred to as the "God particle," to the chagrin of many scientists, who prefer its official name.

But the two experiments, CMS and ATLAS, hadn't collected enough data to say the particle was, for sure, the Higgs boson, the last undiscovered piece of the puzzle predicted by the Standard Model, the reigning theory of particle physics/.../
.