• Physicists see hints that Higgs boson exists

  John Heilprin, Associated Press
  Tuesday, December 13, 2011
  Geneva --
  Physicists are closing in on an elusive subatomic particle that, if found, would confirm a long-held understanding about why matter has mass and how the universe's fundamental building blocks behave.
  Few people outside physics can fully comprehend the search for the Higgs boson, which was first hypothesized 40 years ago. But proving that the "God particle" actually exists would be "a vindication of the equations we've been using all these years," said one Nobel laureate.
  Scientists announced Tuesday that they had found hints but no definitive proof of the particle, which is believed to be a basic component of the universe. They hope to determine whether it exists by next year.
  It's hard to find, not because it is especially tiny but because it is hard to create, said physicist Howard Gordon of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y. He works with the ATLAS experiment, one of two independent teams looking for the Higgs boson at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research near Geneva.
  CERN runs the Large Hadron Collider under the Swiss-French border, a 17-mile tunnel where high-energy beams of protons are sent crashing into each other at incredible speeds.
  A fraction of those collisions could produce the Higgs particle, assuming it exists.
  CERN's director-general, Rolf Heuer, said that "the window for the Higgs mass gets smaller and smaller" as scientists learn more.
  "But be careful - it's intriguing hints," he said. "We have not found it yet. We have not excluded it yet."
  Tuesday's revelations were highly anticipated by thousands of researchers, but the ideas behind the Higgs boson date back to the 1960s.
  British physicist Peter Higgs and others theorized its existence to explain why the fundamental particles in matter have mass. Those particles, such as electrons, are the building blocks of the universe. Mass is a trait that combines with gravity to give an object weight.
  Frank Wilczek, a Nobel laureate and physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said finding the Higgs boson would tie up a loose end of the standard model of physics, which requires that a Higgs-like particle exist.