God has been found

[Gob]

Scientists at Cern will announce that the elusive Higgs boson 'God Particle' has been found at a press conference next week, it is believed.

Five leading theoretical physicists have been invited to the event on Wednesday - sparking speculation that the particle has been discovered.



Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider are expected to say they are 99.99 per cent certain it has been found - which is known as 'four sigma' level.

Physicists first predicted that the Higgs Boson subatomic particle exists 48 years ago.



Peter Higgs, the Edinburgh University emeritus professor of physics that the particle is named after, is among those who have been called to the press conference in Switzerland.

The management at Cern want the two teams of scientists to reach the 'five sigma' level of certainty with their results - so they are 99.99995 per cent sure - such is the significance of the results.

Tom Kibble, 79, the emeritus professor of physics at Imperial College London, has also been invited but is unable to attend.

He told the Sunday Times: 'My guess is that is must be a pretty positive result for them to be asking us out there.'

The Higgs boson is regarded as the key to understanding the universe. Physicists say its job is to give the particles that make up atoms their mass.

Without this mass, these particles would zip though the cosmos at the speed of light, unable to bind together to form the atoms that make up everything in the universe, from planets to people.

The collider, housed in an 18-mile tunnel buried deep underground near the French-Swiss border, smashes beams of protons – sub-atomic particles – together at close to the speed of light, recreating the conditions that existed a fraction of a second after the Big Bang.

If the physicists’ theory is correct, a few Higgs bosons should be created in every trillion collisions, before rapidly decaying.

[Econoline]

Scientists May Have Observed Elusive Higgs Bosom

The bosom has long frustrated scientists hoping to understand
the so-called Standard Swimsuit Model.
In this photo, for example, the bosom remains hidden.

full story here

[kristina]

the elusive Higgs boson 'God Particle' has been found at a press conference

I was wondering where I'd left it...

[Daisy]

Higgs boson walks into a church, the priest says "we don't allow Higgs boson's in here". The Higgs boson replies "but without me how can you have mass?"

Badum-tishhhh

I'll get me coat....

[BoSoxGal]

[Gob]

Higgs boson: The poetry of subatomic particles

The Higgs boson, which scientists at Cern appear to be homing in on after 45 years, gets its name, as everyone knows, from British physicist Peter Higgs, one of the first to propose its existence.

But what about the other part of this great name - boson? This, in fact, is also named after a physicist, the Indian contemporary of Einstein, Satyendra Nath Bose.

Physicists from Russia to California have given lots of curious and sometimes poetic names to the subatomic particles discovered over the last century or so. Here are 10 of them.

1. Higgs boson / God particle
The Higgs boson, proposed by Peter Higgs in 1964, if it exists, is what gives matter mass. It has also been named the name God particle by American physicist Leon Lederman. "He wanted to refer to it as that 'goddamn particle' and his editor wouldn't let him," Higgs told the Guardian. So "God particle" it was.

2. Quark
Three quarks for Muster Mark! / Sure he has not got much of a bark / And sure any he has it's all beside the mark
A fundamental particle that combines to form a range of other particles, including the particles that make up the atomic nucleus - protons and neutrons.
The term was drawn from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake by American physicist Murray Gell-Mann (born 1929) in 1962. He had already come up with the sound, and was thinking of spelling it "kwork".
"Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word 'quark' in the phrase 'Three quarks for Muster Mark'," he explained in his book the Quark and the Jaguar.

3. Hadron
A particle made of quarks. The name was proposed by the Russian theoretical physicist Lev Okun (born 1929) in 1962. He wrote: "In this report I shall call strongly interacting particles 'hadrons'… the Greek hadros signifies "large", "massive", in contrast to leptos which means "small", "light". I hope that this terminology will prove to be convenient." It is in Cern's Large Hadron Collider, a machine in which hadrons are accelerated to high speeds and smashed together, that footprints of the Higgs boson have been spotted.

4. Boson
A class of particles often associated with forces (as the carriers of the force). They obey Bose-Einstein statistics, named after the Indian physicist, Satyendra Nath Bose (1894-1974). The suffix "-on" is Greek, and became standard for newly discovered particles a century ago.

5. Fermion
Gell-Mann gave us quarks, gluons and glueballs
A class of particles which, unlike bosons, obey Fermi-Dirac statistics. They are usually associated with matter rather than force. They are named after the Italian-born physicist Enrico Fermi (1901-1954) a naturalised American regarded as one of the fathers of the atomic bomb, along with Robert Oppenheimer.

6. Gluon
A type of boson responsible for the strong force between quarks. The term derives from the English word "glue". It was first proposed in 1962 by Murray Gell-Mann, who suggested the existence of particles composed of a number of gluons, which he called glueballs.

7. Neutrino
Uncharged particles created as a result of certain types of radioactive decay, with a tiny mass even by the standards of subatomic particles. Neutrino means "small neutral one" in Italian. The particle was first proposed by Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958) in 1930, who gave it the name "neutron". Enrico Fermi renamed it three years later, as "neutron" (from the Latin for "neutral") had begun to be used to refer to the uncharged particle present in the atomic nucleus, along with the proton.

8. Electron
An indivisible quantity of electric charge, proposed in 1894 by the Irish physicist, George Johnston Stoney (1826-1911). Derived from the word "electric" (or the Latin "electrum") plus the Greek suffix "-on".

9. Meson
Continue reading the main story And five more...Lepton - a type of elementary particle (examples include electrons and neutrinos), from the Greek "leptos" meaning "small" or "thin"Photon - a light quantum, the name derived from the Greek "phos" meaning "light"Skyrmion - a type of fermion proposed by British physicist Tony Skyrme (1922-1987)Proton - name given to Hydrogen nucleus by Ernest Rutherford in 1920, from the Greek "protos" meaning "first"WIMP - weakly interactive massive particle
A particle made of a quark and an anti-quark. The name comes from the Greek "meso" meaning "mid", because mesons, when first observed, appeared to have a mass somewhere between that of an electron, and nucleons (the particles - protons and neutrons - making up the atomic nucleus). The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment is a detector on the LHC with which the Cern scientists believe they have found evidence of the new particle consistent with the Higgs boson. It is designed to measure the energy and momentum of muons and some other particles produced by collisions within the collider.

10. Muon
One of a large range of particles named after letters of the Greek alphabet, in this case "mu". It was originally thought to be a type of meson (the mu meson, as distinct, say, from the pi meson), but was later renamed. Mesons came to be defined as particles made up of quarks, while muons are elementary particles.

[MajGenl.Meade]

11. Moron
A particle made of a rubato and a quad. The name comes from the Greek "moro" meaning "dickhead", because morons, when first observed, appeared to have a brain mass somewhere between that of an electric iron and soiled underwear. The Compact Moron Solenoid (CMS) experiment is designed to measure the energy and momentum of morons in threads produced by collisions with LJ, Sean, Gob and other more or less solid elements.

[Daisy]

[Gob]

ROTFLMCO!!!

[Sean]

Excellent Gen'l!

With just one piece of erroneous information...

The experiment is now known as the Particle Light Acceleration & Numpty Baiting experiment.

[Gob]

Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider have detected one of the rarest particle decays seen in Nature.

The finding deals a significant blow to the theory of physics known as supersymmetry.

Many researchers had hoped the LHC would have confirmed this by now.

Supersymmetry, or SUSY, has gained popularity as a way to explain some of the inconsistencies in the traditional theory of subatomic physics known as the Standard Model.

The new observation, reported at the Hadron Collider Physics conference in Kyoto, is not consistent with many of the most likely models of SUSY.

Prof Chris Parkes, who is the spokesperson for the UK Participation in the LHCb experiment, told BBC News: "Supersymmetry may not be dead but these latest results have certainly put it into hospital."


Supersymmetry theorises the existence of more massive versions of particles that have already been detected.

[Gob]

The Large Hadron Collider has restarted, with protons circling the machine's 27km tunnel for the first time since 2013.



Particle beams have now travelled in both directions, inside parallel pipes, at a whisker below the speed of light. Actual collisions will not begin for at least another month, but they will take place with nearly double the energy the LHC reached during its first run.

Scientists hope to glimpse a "new physics" beyond the Standard Model.



Rolf Heuer, the director-general of Cern, which operates the LHC, told engineers and scientists at the lab: "Congratulations. Thank you very much everyone… now the hard work starts". Cern's director for accelerators and technology, Frédérick Bordry, said: "After two years of effort, the LHC is in great shape. "But the most important step is still to come when we increase the energy of the beams to new record levels."

Physicists are frustrated by the existing Standard Model of particle physics. It describes 17 subatomic particles, including 12 building blocks of matter and 5 "force carriers" - the last of which, the Higgs boson, was finally detected by the LHC in 2012.

Teams are also watching the cross-section of the proton beam



Prof Tara Shears, from the University of Liverpool, works on one of the LHC's four big experiments that will soon recommence their work, slamming protons together and quantifying the fallout. "Of course in every particle physics experiment we've ever done, we've been wanting to make a big, unknown discovery," Prof Shears told BBC News. "But now it's become particularly pressing, because with Run One and the discovery of the Higgs, we've discovered everything that our existing theory predicts."

In order to explain several baffling properties of the universe, things beyond the Standard Model have been proposed - but never directly detected. These include dark energy, the all-pervading force suggested to account for the universe expanding faster and faster. And dark matter - the "web" that holds all visible matter in place, and would explain why galaxies spin much faster than they should, based on what we can see.