Rumor Mill: LHC Researchers Expect First Glimpse of the Higgs Boson Next Week

Thursday, December 8, 2011 - 14:50 in Physics & Chemistry

Large Hadron Collider If you're a loyal Popular Science reader, you have no doubt heard about the LHC. Conceived as the most powerful accelerator in history, the LHC is housed in a 17-mile-long, 12-foot-wide tunnel beneath Switzerland and France. It needs 96 tons of liquid helium to keep its magnets cool, and, if they ever get it to work right, might be the first accelerator to detect the elusive, mass-imbuing particle known as the Higgs boson. At a meeting on Tuesday, the ATLAS and CMS experiments are expected to show their first data that offers a peek at the God Particle There's no official announcement yet--that comes next week--but word on the street and around the cafeteria at CERN says that scientists may announce that they've glimpsed the elusive Higgs boson at a meeting scheduled for Tuesday. Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider have been saying that they are closing...

Read the whole article on PopSci

More from PopSci

Latest Science Newsletter

Get the latest and most popular science news articles of the week in your Inbox! It's free!

Check out our next project, Biology.Net