99.99% sure ‘God Particle’ found!
“We have observed a new boson with a mass of 125.3 plus or minus 0.6 GeV at 4.9 sigma standard deviation. This is a preliminary result, but we think it's very strong and very solid,” announced Joseph Incandela to a round of applause.
Fabiola Gianotti of ATLAS,
the other team at the world's biggest atom smasher, announced that they
have similar results at around 126 Gev with 5 sigma certainty.
Five Sigma is the usual
particle physics threshold for discovery; it translates to 99.99997%
certainty of discovery of a new particle.
The new particle, if
confirmed with further research, would have a mass 130 times that of a
proton, making it the most massive particle that exists
. The experiment
The Higgs boson was discovered by smashing beams of protons - sub-atomic particles - together at close to the speed of light, recreating the conditions as it were a fraction of a second after the Big Bang.
The protons were smashed inside the Large Hadron Collider, which is the largest and most complex machine ever made. It has a circumference of 27 km (17 miles) and lies underground, straddling French and Swiss territory.
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