Live Update on Search for Higgs Particle

Physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland, are providing an update right now on the search for the Higgs boson, the particle long theorized for making some particles, such as electrons, relatively light, and some, such as quarks, relatively heavy. As I write, a long presentation was just concluded by Fabriola Giannoti, head of the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, the facility at the France-Swiss border where protons smash each other at record energies,with the possibility of new particles emerging from the collision.

It’s clear by now that no discovery of the Higgs is going to be announced today, but Giannoti is revealing an excess of collision events that may suggest the production and decay of the Higgs. A key part of the search is determining what the mass of the Higgs might be. Researchers have pretty much ruled out a number of mass ranges for the Higgs. She is reporting the most likely mass region for the Higgs to lie between 115.5-131 GeV/c^2, which corresponds to roughly 114-130 times the mass of the hydrogen atom. She reported some interesting events at 123.6 GeV/c^2, and 124.3 GeV/c^2, and an excess of events at around 126 GeV/c^2, but with not enough collision statistics to declare a discovery. Further collisions over the next year should help to further pin down whether the particle exists here.

Guido Tonelli, spokesperson of another LHC experiment, known as CMS, is beginning the other main presentation.

The webcast, if you can connect to it, is at http://webcast.web.cern.ch/webcast/

We’ll have more information later this morning. Thanks for reading!