In case you haven't heard, the Higgs boson or more correctly a Higgs like boson was detected by both the Atlas and CMS experiments at the
Large Hadron Collider (LHC),
Cern near Geneva, Switzerland. If you'd like to check out the in depth coverage of the monumental event as it happened here on The Daily Kos here's a link to
science's excellent live blog of the announcement:
Higgs Boson Announcement v5.0 -- DISCOVERY!!!!.
Here is a definition of the Higgs boson given by Daily Kos's very own theoretical particle physicist, science, in his diary mentioned above.
So what is the Higgs? Physicists assume that everywhere in space there is a field called a "Higgs field". On Earth, we all know that everywhere in space there is something called a "magnetic field". The Higgs field is similar, but it has no preferred direction and is constant everywhere in the Universe. When particles move through the Higgs field, they interact with it and the main effect of this interaction is to give these particles a mass. All particle masses arise from the particle's interaction with the Higgs field, and heavy particles interact more strongly with the field than light particles do. Let me use an analogy to explain this further.
Suppose there is a reception at Netroots Nation, and a loosely-packed crowd of Kossacks is in a room. If I walk into the room, nobody really knows me so I can walk right through without much slowing---so I have little resistance to my motion. Now suppose Markos walks in. Everyone will go towards him, and it will take much longer for him to walk through the room. He will have more "mass", it will be harder for him to move quickly.
Ok, I know, you're really here for the fireworks :) So, hop (but not Mott) the Hoople...
So here's the camera we used to snap our pics.
Our camera is a huge ring shaped tunnel (a torus) with walls made of superconducting magnets. It is 27 kilometers (16.8 miles in Murican) in circumference, about 100 meters below ground, and located on the border of France and Switzerland. The camera has a couple of lenses known affectionately as the
CMS and
ATLAS by folk in the know. Guess what, now you know :)
What's that? Where are the fireworks? Ok, Ok here ya go...
Beautiful, isn't it? I won ruin it by 'splainin it, Lucy. Ask in the comments if you are interested.
Here is a view from across the detector (lens), down the beam so to speak...
And a look at the detector chamber lengthwise...
From the ATLAS experiment a 2 photon event, a 4 muon, and a 2 muon, 2 electron event...
Once again from the CMS experiment. This time the event shows 2 energetic photons....
All of these graphics are examples of the data (and there was a ton of data [27 TB of raw data per day, plus 10 TB of “event summary data”]
Wiki) that Cern scientists used to determine the existence of the Higgs like particle that they announced on July 4th.
12:06 PM PT: Thank you Spotlighters! I think I'll celebrate by having a nice cold beer on a hot day :)
