CERN announces observation of new particle consistent with long-sought Higgs boson

Wednesday, July 4, 2012 - 09:30 in Physics & Chemistry

The following is adapted from a press release issued today by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.At a seminar held at CERN today as a curtain-raiser to the year’s major particle physics conference — the International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP) in Melbourne, Australia — the ATLAS and CMS experiments presented their latest preliminary results in the search for the long-sought Higgs particle. Both experiments observe a new particle in the mass region around 125 to 126 GeV (gigaelectronvolts, a unit of energy equal to one billion electron volts).More than 50 MIT physicists, led by six faculty members, were part of the 3,000-member CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), making the Institute home to that group’s largest contingent of physicists from any American university. “We observe in our data clear signs of a new particle, at the level of 5 sigma, in the...

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