GENEVA (AP) - The search is all but over for a subatomic particle that is a crucial building block of the universe.
Physicists announced Thursday they believe they have discovered the
subatomic particle predicted nearly a half-century ago, which will go a
long way toward explaining what gives electrons and all matter in the
universe size and shape.
The elusive particle, called a Higgs boson,
was predicted in 1964 to help fill in our understanding of the creation
of the universe, which many theorize occurred in a massive explosion
known as the Big Bang. The particle was named for Peter Higgs, one of the physicists who proposed its existence, but it later became popularly known as the "God particle."
Last July, scientists at CERN, the Geneva-based European Organization for Nuclear Research,
announced finding a particle they described as Higgs-like, but they
stopped short of saying conclusively that it was the same particle or
some version of it.
Scientists have now finished going through the entire set of data
year and announced the results in a statement and at a physics
conference in the Italian Alps.
"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,"
said Joe Incandela, a physicist who heads one of the two main teams at
CERN that each involve about 3,000 scientists.
Its existence helps confirm the
theory that objects gain their size and shape when particles interact in
an energy field with a key particle, the Higgs boson. The more they attract, the theory goes, the bigger their mass will be.
But, it remains an "open question," CERN said in a statement, whether
this is the Higgs boson that was expected in the original formulation,
or possibly the lightest of several predicted in some theories that go
beyond that model.
But for now, it said, there can be little doubt that a Higgs boson does exist, in some form.
Whether or not it is a Higgs boson is demonstrated by how it
interacts with other particles and its quantum properties, CERN said in
the statement. The data "strongly indicates that it is a Higgs boson,"
it said.
The discovery would be a strong contender for the Nobel Prize, though
it remains unclear whether that might go to Higgs and the others who
first proposed the theory or to the thousands of scientists who found
it, or to all of them.
The hunt for the Higgs entailed the use of CERN's atom smasher, the
Large Hadron Collider, which cost some $10 billion to build and run in a
17-mile (27-kilometer) tunnel beneath the Swiss-French border.
It has been creating high-energy collisions to smash protons and then
study the collisions and determine how subatomic particles acquire mass
— without which the particles would fail to stick together.
