Outside that range, the scientists are more than 95 percent confident that the Higgs cannot exist. The researchers have now cornered the Higgs mass in the range between 114.4 and 131 gigaelectronvolts (GeV).For comparison, a proton weighs 1 GeV.
"With the data from this year we've ruled out a lot of masses, and now we're just left with this tiny window, in this region that is probably the most interesting," said Jonas Strandberg, a researcher at CERN working on the ATLAS experiment. Ironically, physicists don't have a specific prediction for the mass of the Higgs boson itself, so they must search a wide range of possible masses for signs of the particle.īased on data collected at LHC's CMS and ATLAS experiments, researchers said they are now able to narrow down the Higgs' mass to a small range, and exclude a wide swath of possibilities. The Higgs boson is thought to be tied to a field (the Higgs field) that is responsible for giving all other particles their mass. "These are really tough experiments, and it's just really impressive what they're doing," Harvard University theoretical physicist Lisa Randall told LiveScience. "It's something really extraordinary and I think we can be all proud of this," said CERN physicist Fabiola Gianotti, spokesperson for the LHC's ATLAS experiment, during a public seminar announcing the results today.Įxperts outside the LHC collaborations agreed. Though the news is not the final answer some were hoping for, the progress is a significant, exciting step, physicists say. Today's announcement was highly anticipated by both the physics community and the public, with speculation running rampant in the days leading up to it that the elusive particle may have finally been found. "We may be getting the first tantalizing hints, but it's a whiff, it's a smell, it's not quite the whole thing." "I think we are getting very close," said Vivek Sharma, a physicist at the University of California, San Diego, and the leader of the Higgs search at LHC's CMS experiment.
13) that they'd narrowed down the list of possible hiding spots for the Higgs, (also called the God particle) and even see some indications that they're hot on its trail. Scientists at the world's largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland, announced today (Dec. Physicists are closer than ever to hunting down the elusive Higgs boson particle, the missing piece of the governing theory of the universe's tiniest building blocks.
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