Weizmann Institute of Science astrophysicists have been prominent inthe experiments that have shown "promising signs" of the existence ofthe Higgs boson – the "God particle" – that provides a framework for allof the subatomic particles in nature and has been sought for decades.
Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the CERN researchcenter in Switzerland said in an excited announcement on Tuesday that itfound some evidence in its experiments of the existence of theelementary particle.
It was suggested in 1964 by six physicists, including University ofEdinburgh physicist Peter Higgs whom it was named after, as a way toexplain mass.
The sub-atomic particle called Higgs is the one piece of the StandardModel of Particle Physics that has not been proven to exist, and somescientists believe that the model will have to be rethought if the Higgsis not found.
Prof. Giora Mikenberg of the Rehovot institute was the ATLAS MuonProject leader for many years and now heads the Israeli LHC team.
Prof. Ehud Duchovni heads the Weizmann Atlas group, as well as asmall group looking for SUSY signals. Prof Eilam Gross is currently theATLAS Higgs physics group convener.
All are members of the Weizmann Institute's Particle Physics andAstrophysics Department, and they have been part of the effort to findthe Higgs since 1987.
ATLAS and its sister experiment in the LHC, CMS, have been searching for the Higgs boson together.
"In 2011, the LHC particle accelerator in Geneva collided over 300trillion protons," said Gross. "All of that enormous energy –seven-trillion electron volts – went into the effort to produce theHiggs boson.
But in each collision, other similar particles are created, and thereis no way to foresee what we will find. The chances of a collisionproducing a Higgs boson are so small that only about 100 are expected tobe observed over the course of a year."
Finding possible signs of a Higgs involved looking for statisticalanomalies in the data (compared to what the results would look like ifthere were no Higgs) in the expected mass range.
The problem is that once these anomalies appear, the scientists hadto rule out statistical flukes. But several weeks ago, it was noticedthat "extra" events in the probable Higgs range had accumulated in theexperimental results during 2011.
"We couldn't believe our eyes – we looked at the screen for agesbefore we started to digest what we were seeing," Gross continued.
"In the past three weeks, the entire Higgs search team in the ATLASexperiment have checked and rechecked the results from every possibleangle. We checked for errors… for bugs in the program."
The ATLAS results suggest that there could be a Higgs boson with amass of around 126 GeV, and that there is just a 1 in 5,000 chance thatthe extra events they observed in this particular mass are the result ofa statistical fluke, and not the creation of a Higgs boson.
Such fluctuations might still disappear, so the proof is still not atall conclusive, but scientists believe that it bodes well for the nextround of LHC collisions, which are due to begin in April 2012.
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