Science’s Evidence of “God Particle” Still Agnostic
The science world was all atwitter last night about today’s announcement from CERN. Had the Higgs boson, the yet-to-be-observed subatomic particle thought by some to endow other particles with mass (prompting the nickname of “God Particle”), fina...
Possible Higgs boson signals, but we won’t know for sure until next year
This morning, the spokespeople for the two main detectors at the Large Hadron Collider, ATLAS and CMS, gave talks on their teams' latest results in the search for the Higgs boson. As expected, the...
Rolling the dice: understanding how physicists hunt for the Higgs
Tomorrow, CERN will be webcasting a talk on the latest results in its search for the Higgs boson, a particle that is theorized to provide other particles with mass. The director of CERN has...
Fast neutrinos, C-P violations, and the shrinking space for the Higgs
It has been a busy week in the world of particle physics, with attention focused on the home of the LHC: CERN. This year, the LHC generated five inverse femtobarns worth of data—nearly half...
LHCb detector causes trouble for supersymmetry theory
Two of the general purpose detectors at the LHC, ATLAS and CMS, tend to keep a high profile, as they're designed to be able to spot anything that comes out of the collisions—the Higgs, dark...
Simulate proton smashing with updated LHC@home
Particle physics may be all about finding the unknown, but to do that we need a really strong grip on the known. If the Higgs boson is out there, it's just one of a...
Physicists find hints of a light Higgs boson in LHC data
During Ars' trip to Fermilab earlier this spring, the staff was excitedly talking about their expectations for the summer. That's when the high-energy physics community has many of their meetings, and the expectation was......
LHC spots no black holes, eliminates some versions of string theory
The results continue to pour out of the LHC's first production run. This week, the folks behind the CMS detector have announced the submission of a paper to Physics Letters that describes a test of...
Getting the lead in turns LHC into a mini Big Bang machine
When it's colliding protons, the LHC is a particle discovery machine. The protons themselves contain only a few quarks, so they don't create much noise that could hinder the search for exotic particles that may emerge from the......
LHC spots possible signs of a high-energy particle soup (updated)
Today, the scientists running the Compact Muon Solenoid detector at the Large Hadron Collider reported some of the first signs of unexpected physics happening at the LHC. After tracking the particles that have spilled out of so...
Feature: A photo tour of the Large Hadron Collider
Back in July, we were fortunate enough to have the opportunity to tour CERN, home of the Large Hadron Collider. In addition to getting some great information on how the machine gets protons up to speeds nearly that...
The Large Hadron Collider cranks up the collisions
In our story about how protons find their way into the LHC, we spent a fair bit of time emphasizing the importance of the machine's luminosity, which is a rough measure of how many collisions...
