By Devin Powell
In the hunt for the Higgs boson, the world’s most powerful particle collider has tightened the net. New data collected this year by CERN’s Large Hadron Collider near Geneva narrow the range of allowable masses for the hypothetical particle, whose existence would confirm the mechanism thought to give mass to other particles.
To fit with the standard model, the cornerstone of modern particle physics, the Higgs must now be lighter than 145 billion electron volts, or GeV. Team members from LHC’s ATLAS and CMS experiments presented their results August 22 in Mumbai, India at the International Symposium on Lepton Photon Interactions at High Energies.