Finally, physics’s zoo of subatomic particles is full. Scientists have almost certainly snared the Higgs boson, the last particle waiting to be roped into the fold.
Decades after it was proposed, the Higgs emerged in the shards of particle collisions at the world’s most powerful accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN laboratory near Geneva. Physicists announced the discovery on July 4 during a seminar at the lab.
“We have now found the last missing cornerstone of the standard model,” said Rolf-Dieter Heuer, CERN’s director-general. “It’s the beginning of a long journey to investigate all the properties of this interesting particle.”
The particle’s mass is around 125 billion electron volts, or about 133 times the mass of a proton. CERN captured the Higgs in two huge experiments, each of which independently reached the gold-standard statistical level for confirming the particle’s discovery.
One of the theorists who first proposed the particle nearly five decades ago joined in the all-around congratulations. “It really is an incredible thing that it’s happened in my lifetime,” said Peter Higgs of the University of Edinburgh.
In one respect, finding the Higgs simply confirms the standard model, physicists’ framework for understanding the particles that make up the universe and the forces that govern them. But the discovery also opens new areas to explore, including alternate versions of the standard model that could explain some of the biggest unanswered questions about the cosmos.