CERN experiments observe particle consistent with long-sought Higgs boson

July 04, 2012

The ATLAS and CMS experiments announced at a seminar at CERN on July 4th, 2012 the observation of a new particle in the search for the elusive Higgs Boson. This search for this new particle took form almost 40 years ago, when physicists assembled what is now known as the Standard Model. The model organizes the fundamental constituents of matter and the forces that determine how they interact. The role of the Higgs particle is to confer mass to the elementary particles and is a crucial piece of the Standard Model.

While presenting strong evidence for the existence of a new particle, the LHC experiments need more data to confirm whether the new particle has properties consistent with the Standard Model Higgs Boson or how well its properties match the Standard Model predictions. In any case this is one of the most significant breakthroughs in physics in decades.

The Boston University Physics Department has faculty members working on both ATLAS (Ahlen, Black, Butler, Shank) and CMS (Bose, Heister, Rohlf, Sulak) in addition to a number of post-doctoral research associates and graduate students on each experiment. The connections with Boston University particle physicists as well as undergraduate students in the University of Geneva exchange program was highlighted in BU Today.

Higgs candidate event from CMS An event display from the CMS detector visualizing one of the collisions that has produced what may be a Higgs particle.
Atlas Higgs candidate An event display from the Atlas detector visualizing one of the collisions that has produced what may be a Higgs particle.