Fresh Data From CERN and Tevatron Gives A Glimpse of the God Particle
Simulated Higgs Event This simulation shows the production of a Higgs boson following a collision of two protons. The Higgs decays into two jets of hadrons and two electrons. via Wikimedia CommonsA picture starts to emerge from the fog We know, we've been hearing rumors about interesting "data bumps" for months now, but this is big news - over the weekend the world's two greatest particle smashers announced tantalizing hints that the Higgs boson may soon be within reach. Again, no one is shouting eureka just yet, but taken together, collision data from the Large Hadron Collider and the Tevatron suggest scientists may have seen the first glimpses of the elusive Higgs particle, the grand prize of physics. At a conference on Friday, the Atlas and CMS teams at the LHC reported finding a large number of interesting particle events between a mass range of 130 and 150 giga-electronvolts (GeV). Then over...