CERN To Give Update on Higgs Particle In ICHEP Conference

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CERN Announces Discovery of Higgs Boson
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The Higgs Boson is theorized to be the particle that determines the mass of an object. A boson is a class of particles and these particles form a field; the Higgs field. This is similar to how photons comprise the electromagnetic field.

By discovering the Higgs Boson, scientist may then understand how mass is obtained and why some elements have more mass than others.

Mass can be defined as a quantitive measure of the resistance an object has to change in its velocity. Unlike weight, mass is not affected by gravity. An object has no weight in space but still has mass.

The Higgs Mechanism as proposed by Peter Higgs is that there is a Higgs field that are attracted to objects which slows them down, giving them mass. The more particles (Higgs Boson) of the field that the object attracts, the more mass it has. Furthermore, as the mass of an object approaches zero, the closer it gets to accelerating to the speed of light. This can be seen with light, since light has no mass and travels at that speed.

CERN To Give Update on Higgs In ICHEP Conference

For the past few days, news have been abuzz about the announcement of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Melbourne, Australia on July 4 at the 2012 International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP). The 2012 ICHEP is this year's major particle physics conference where the ATLAS and CMS experiments will deliver the preliminary results of their 2012 data analysis.

The A Toroidal LHC Apparatus (ATLAS) and Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiments are the largest international scientific collaborations in history, involving more than 3000 scientists, engineers, and students from 172 institutes in 40 countries.

“Data taking for ICHEP concluded on Monday 18 June after a very successful first period of LHC running in 2012,” said CERN’s Director for Accelerators and Technology, Steve Myers. “I’m very much looking forward to seeing what the data reveals.”

Video: The Latest on the Higgs Boson - ICHEP 2012 conference

The 2012 LHC run schedule was designed to deliver the maximum possible quantity of data to the experiments before the ICHEP conference, and with more data delivered between April and June 2012 than in the whole 2011 run, the strategy has been a success. Furthermore, the experiments have been refining their analysis techniques to improve their efficiency in picking out Higgs-like events from the millions of collisions occurring every second. This means that their sensitivity to new phenomena has significantly increased for both years’ data sets. The crunching of all this data has been done by the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid, which has exceeded its design specifications to handle the unprecedented volume of data and computing.

“We now have more than double the data we had last year,” said CERN Director for Research and Computing, Sergio Bertolucci, “that should be enough to see whether the trends we were seeing in the 2011 data are still there, or whether they’ve gone away. It’s a very exciting time.”

If and when a new particle is discovered, ATLAS and CMS will need time to ascertain whether it is the long sought Higgs boson, the last missing ingredient of the Standard Model of particle physics, or whether it is a more exotic form of the boson that could open the door to new physics.

“It’s a bit like spotting a familiar face from afar,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer, “sometimes you need closer inspection to find out whether it’s really your best friend, or actually your best friend’s twin.”

The Standard Model gives an extraordinarily precise picture of the matter that makes up all the visible universe, and the forces that govern its behaviour, but there are good reasons to believe that this is not the end of the story. For example, we know from observation that the visible universe is just 4% of what seems to be out there.

Physicists from around the world gathering in Melbourne for the ICHEP conference will be able to join the seminar via a live two-way link. The seminar will be followed by a press conference at CERN. It will be available via webcast at http://webcast.cern.ch/, accompanied by plain language interpretations from physicists accessible in blogs and chats from the webcast site.

Quantum Day

03 July 2012

CERN To Give Update on Higgs Particle In ICHEP Conference