CERN announced their discovery of a new subatomic particle on Wednesday, which is believed to fulfill the properties of Higgs boson, the last undiscovered and most fundamental elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics.
The Higgs boson, also called the “God particle” from Nobel laureate Leon Lederman’s book, is considered to be the particle which creates a sort of force field that permeates the universe, imbuing the physical world with the fundamental property known as mass.
"We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature," said Rolf Heuer, CERN director general.
"The discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson opens the way to more detailed studies, requiring larger statistics, which will pin down the new particle's properties, and is likely to shed light on other mysteries of our universe."
The idea of Higgs boson was first proposed and named by British theoretical physicist Peter Higgs in 1964. This discovery of the Higgs particle is considered to be a deciding factor for Standard Model of particle physics to move further.
“It is very satisfying. For me personally it’s just the confirmation of something I did 48 years ago,” Reuters quoted Peter Higgs. “I had no expectation that I would still be alive when it happened. For physics, in one way, it is the end of an ear in that it completes the Standard Model.”
This discovery came from two separate independently worked CERN teams, based on the research of Large Hardron Collier’s (LHD) data. After years of work, both teams found strong signals to prove the new particle at about 125 to 126GeV.
"The fact that both our teams have independently come to the same results is very powerful," said Oliver Buchmueller, a senior member in one of the research teams, according to Reuters.
"We know it is a new boson. But we still have to prove definitively that it is the one that Higgs predicted."
The signal to prove the existence of this “God particle” is the “dramatic 5 sigma signal,” which means there is just less than one in a million chance of a fluke in the data. And five sigma is a widely accepted measure standard for scientists to believe a new discovery.
"If I were a betting man, I would bet that it is the Higgs. But we can't say that definitely yet. It is very much a smoking duck that walks and quacks like the Higgs. But we now have to open it up and look inside before we can say that it is indeed the Higgs," said Buchmueller.
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