Scientists may have found 'God particle'

4 Jul 2012, 9:27 pm   -   Source: AAP

Scientists say they've found a new particle consistent with the Higgs boson, which is the key to the scientific understanding of all matter.

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Scientists believe they have found the long sought-after "God particle" that shapes the universe, a discovery one excited physicist compared to Columbus discovering America.

Teams of physicists from around the world believe they may have found proof of the theoretical Higgs boson that confers mass, the key missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle that determines why nature is the way it is.

They have discovered a particle consistent with the Higgs boson, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, or CERN, announced in Geneva and Melbourne on Wednesday.

While the teams involved in the experiments at the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator near Geneva stressed that the results were preliminary, physicists could barely contain their excitement.

"A new particle has been discovered that looks like the Higgs boson and the dice are now loaded in favour of a discovery," said the University of Liverpool's head of particle physics, Professor Themis Bowcock.

"Based on the CERN results alone there appears to be less than one chance in a million that this is fake, which is roughly the same probability as flipping a coin heads-up 21 times in a row," Prof Bowcock said.

"Very few physicists would privately argue that this is not a Higgs particle."

The discovery of the Higgs boson, half a century after it was first proposed, represented a major breakthrough in our fundamental understanding of nature, he said.

"For physicists, this is the equivalent of Columbus discovering America."

The experiment's teams are not yet sure if the particle is the long sought-after Higgs boson or something more "exotic".

The next step would be to determine the precise nature of the particle and its significance for our understanding of the universe, CERN said, adding that would take considerable time and data.

Still, CERN director general Rolf Heuer said it was a milestone and pinning down the new particle's properties would shed light on other mysteries of the universe.

"As a layman, I think we have it, but as a scientist I have to say, 'What do we have?'" he said.

"I think we have a success today.

"We have a discovery, we have discovered a new particle, most probably a Higgs boson."

The Higgs boson is the key missing piece of the rule book of how elementary particles and forces interact in the universe.

That standard model of particle physics describes the fundamental particles from which we, and every visible thing in the universe, are made, and the forces acting between them, CERN says.

"All the matter that we can see, however, appears to be no more than about four per cent of the total.

"A more exotic version of the Higgs particle could be a bridge to understanding the 96 per cent of the universe that remains obscure."

A spokesman for one of two teams involved in the experiment said the preliminary results were dramatic.

"We know it must be a boson and it's the heaviest boson ever found," CMS experiment spokesman Joe Incandela said.

Prof Bowcock said the modern understanding of physics relied on the existence of the Higgs boson, which interacted with other particles, making some very heavy while leaving others light, shaping the universe as we know it.

"For the last 40 years it has allowed us to understand phenomena such as light, the way the sun burns, and how atoms and nuclei are held together. Without the Higgs there would be no stars and ultimately no life."

There's talk that the man who first theorised the existence of the God particle in the 1960s, British physicist Peter Higgs, may receive a Nobel Prize if it has, in fact, been found.

Applauded by physicists in Geneva and Melbourne as he congratulated those who worked on the experiments, Prof Higgs said, "Really it is incredible that this has happened in my lifetime."

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