God Particle Discovery Confirmed

BBC

LHC cements Higgs boson identification

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider say the particle outlined in July 2012 looks increasingly to be a Higgs boson.

The Higgs, long theorised as the means by which particles get their mass, had been the subject of a decades-long hunt at the world's particle accelerators.

What remains unclear is if the particle found at the LHC is the simplest form of Higgs, or something more "exotic".

Results presented at the Moriond meeting in Italy point to it being a simple, "Standard Model" version.

Teams from the two Higgs-hunting experiments, Atlas and CMS, analysed two-and-a-half times more data than were available in July in an effort to pin down not only the particle's existence, but also something about its character.

Subatomic particles are characterised by properties including their "spin" and "parity".

In the case of the particle announced last year, these properties become evident only through the analysis of precisely how it decays quickly into other particles within the LHC's detectors.

"The preliminary results with the full 2012 data set are magnificent and to me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson, though we still have a long way to go to know what kind of Higgs boson it is," said CMS spokesperson Joe Incandela.

http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21785205