Is the Large Hadron Collider closing in on Higgs particle? – WBNews

Are the Higgs hunters closing in on their quarry? Listening to the buzz at the Europhysics conference in Grenoble, one might be forgiven for thinking scientists are on the verge of something historic. They have been analysing an impressive amount of data amassed by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) over a year-and-a-half of operations. The vast machine, housed in a circular tunnel below the French-Swiss border, was designed to uncover the Higgs boson – the sub-atomic particle that has so far avoided detection by any previous particle accelerator. Improvements to the LHC’s US counterpart – the Tevatron – have enabled it to stay in the Higgs race. At the weekend, it emerged that scientists working on the 20-year-old accelerator have also caught possible hints of the particle. Both machines work by accelerating two beams of particles to high energies and then smashing them together. This is done in order to generate new particles in the collisions – perhaps even the Higgs. Predicted to exist by Edinburgh University physicist Peter Higgs and others in the 1960s, the boson particle is the last missing piece in the Standard Model – the framework built to describe the interactions of sub-atomic particles, and the most widely accepted theory of particle physics. The Higgs explains why other particles have mass, making it crucial to our understanding of the cosmos. The LHC’s predecessor – the Lep 2 – lacked the power to produce the Higgs. Its replacement is the highest energy accelerator ever built, capable of…more detail