Researchers operating the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle
accelerator have confirmed that a particle discovered in July 2012 is
indeed the so-called Higgs boson, a key element in scientists' theories
explaining the makeup of all the matter around us.
"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," Joe Incandela, a
spokesman for the CMS experiment at the collider, said at a scientific
conference in Geneva.
"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," said researchers at the
European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN.
Scientists
believe that the Higgs boson is the last discovered particle outlined by
the Standard Model of particle physics, which explains the interaction
of all subatomic particles.
It is one of the fundamental theories of modern physics, which is why it is sometimes called "the theory of almost everything".
More
experiments and LHC data processing will follow to determine the full
properties of the discovered particle, which is a daunting task
considering that the detection of the boson is a very rare event - it
takes around one trillion proton-proton collisions for each observed
instance, according to CERN researchers.
The LHC, the world's
biggest particle accelerator launched in 2008, was built with the prime
goal of either finding the Higgs boson, whose existence was predicted by
British physicist Peter Higgs in the 1960s, or disproving it, possibly
undermining the Standard Model.