Higgs boson range narrows at European collider

Higgs boson range narrows at European collider

Higgs boson range narrows at European collider. Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider say a signal that suggested they might have seen "hints" of the long-sought Higgs boson particle has weakened.

New results to be presented this week at a conference in India all but eliminate the mid-range where the Higgs - if it exists - might be found.Physicists will now search for the boson at lower and higher energy ranges.

It is much more difficult to detect new particles in these ranges, however.

Nonetheless, LHC researchers still believe they will either have found the Higgs by the end of next year or confirmed that it does not exist in the form proposed by the current theory of subatomic particles and their interactions, called the Standard Model.

"These are exciting times for particle physics," said Sergio Bertolucci, the research director at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern), which runs the LHC.

"Discoveries are almost assured within the next 12 months. If the Higgs exists, the LHC experiments will soon find it. If it does not, its absence will point the way to new physics."

The Higgs particle was postulated by physicists in 1964 to explain how other sub-atomic particles have mass. It remains the only major particle in the Standard Model yet to be observed, and its discovery or elimination is one of the LHC's chief objectives.

The collider is a giant accelerator machine housed in a 27km-long (17 miles) circular tunnel under the French-Swiss border.

Two beams of proton particles are fired around this subterranean "ring" and smashed together at crossing points.

Big detectors are located at these points to look for new particles in the sub-atomic wreckage of the collisions.

Last month, scientists reported at the Europhysics meeting in Grenoble, France, that the collisions were throwing up some intriguing results.

The data presented at the meeting showed what physicists described as "excess events" across the search area - or mass region - where the Higgs has been predicted to be found. The most significant of these was a surplus of unusual particle events at a mass of 140-145 gigaelectronvolts (GeV).

Since the results were presented, the amount of data collected by the two detectors being used to find the Higgs has more than doubled, according to Fabiola Gianotti, who speaks for the Atlas Collaboration, one of the teams searching for the Higgs.

"Thanks to the superb performance of the LHC, we have recorded a huge amount of new data over the last month," she said. "This has allowed us to make very good progress in our understanding of the Standard Model and in the search for the Higgs boson and new physics."

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