By DENNIS OVERBYE
Dr. Higgs, I presume?
A team of physicists gathered in a room at CERN on Friday to begin crunching new data from the Large Hadron Collider this year. And they will be at it all week.
What they are seeing nobody knows.
What they are looking for is the beginning to the end of the longest and most expensive manhunt in the history of physics, one that has involved several generations of larger and larger particle accelerators: the spoor of a hypothetical particle that endows other elementary particles with mass. Known as the Higgs boson, it is the cornerstone of modern physics, but confirmation of its existence has eluded scientists for 40 years.
In December, scientists went into a qualified tizzy when two teams of physicists working on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, outside Geneva, reported hints — but only hints — of a bump in their data that could be the boson.
The new data will show whether that was a fluke or whether they are really on the road to discovering the long-lost boson, physicists say. They are racing to make a deadline to report the results at the International Conference on High Energy Physics, or Ichep, in Melbourne, Australia, starting July 4.
|