CERN Imperial scientists celebrate Higgs boson announcement (PA)

Scientists gathered today to hear the latest results from the world's largest experiment, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)

The Higgs boson is believed to convey mass to the fundamental particles that form the building blocks of the universe. Without evidence of its existence, physicists could not fully underpin all the currently held laws that explain the interactions between the Universe's elementary particles. Now these results bring to a close a series of experiments designed to verify its existence, and open a new series of challenges for fundamental physics.

Speaking at special seminars held concurrently at CERN, the home of the LHC in Geneva, the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Melbourne, and a press conference in London, physicists working on the Atlas and the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiments presented the latest data in their hunt for this obscure Higgs boson.

In December 2011, results from the two particle detectors already appeared to be converging, now new results from both camps have allowed scientists to individually identify a particle they are 99.999 per cent certain to be the Higgs boson. The new particle has a large mass, around 125 times the mass of the proton particle that is used as a standard unit of measure of mass for all particles. The scientists say that more experimentation is needed before it can be fully confirmed all its physical properties can be understood.

In a statement to the media, Professor Virdee said: "Today is a historic day. A new heavy particle, the first of its kind, has been observed in CMS. It took 20 years to build the Compact Muon Solenoid detector, arguably the most complex scientific instrument ever built. This result is a tribute to the talent and dedication of thousands of scientists and engineers from about 40 countries that built and now operate CMS. Within the experimental precision achieved so far the results appear consistent with expectations for a standard model Higgs boson. The Higgs boson is the last and key missing element of the highly successful standard model, one of the great achievements of 20th Century science. More data are required to reveal whether it has all the properties of the standard model Higgs boson or whether some do not match, implying new physics beyond the standard model. I believe this observation opens the door to a new vista of physics that will take many more years to explore.â