Short Circuit Snags Giant Atom Smasher Restart
CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, has run into a bit of a snag in its plans to have its upgraded Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator — up and running by this week for its second three-year run. Officials are suggesting that the delay in getting […]
Scientists Confirm Higgs Boson Discovery
Scientists working with the world’s largest atom smasher say the mystery particle they found last summer was a Higgs boson, which is believed to give mass to everything in the universe. However, while the physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) confirm the particle is a Higgs boson, it doesn’t appear to have […]
Does ‘God Particle’ Spell End of the Universe?
Last summer, when scientists finally cornered the elusive building block of the universe known as the Higgs boson, they apparently also discovered something else: that the universe’s days might be numbered. “It may be that the universe we live in is inherently unstable,” said Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist from the U.S. Department of Energy’s […]
Is There Another Higgs Boson Out There?
Tired, and rushing to meet a looming deadline, Dr. Pierre Savard and his colleagues didn’t realize what they’d found when they first came across a particle that looked a lot like the long-sought-after Higgs boson. But it didn’t take long for them to realize their hard work had paid off. “When we looked at it, […]
Nailing Down the Elusive Higgs Boson
Although it was the Fourth of July holiday in the United States, there were plenty of fireworks in Europe, where scientists announced they’d probably found the elusive Higgs boson, a particle believed to give all objects mass. At CERN headquarters in Geneva, two independent scientific teams – ATLAS and CMS – announced they’ve observed a […]