Latest Higgs boson Stories

The territory where the Higgs boson may be found continues to shrink. The latest analysis of data from the CDF and DZero collider experiments at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermilab now excludes a significant fraction of the allowed Higgs mass range established by earlier measurements. Those experiments predict that the Higgs particle should have a mass between 114 and 185 GeV/c2. Now the CDF and DZero results carve out a section in the middle of this range and establish that it cannot...

Scientists of the DZero collaboration at the Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory have achieved the world's most precise measurement of the mass of the W boson by a single experiment. Combined with other measurements, the reduced uncertainty of the W boson mass will lead to stricter bounds on the mass of the elusive Higgs boson.The W boson is a carrier of the weak nuclear force and a key element of the Standard Model of elementary particles and forces. The particle,...

A group of 28 scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) have observed particle collisions that produce single top quarks. The observation resulted from proton-antiproton collisions measured by the DZero detector in Fermilab's Tevatron, currently the world's most powerful operating particle accelerator.The discovery of the single top quark confirms critical parameters of particle physics, including the total number of quarks, and is...

The race is underway to find evidence of a hypothetical particle called the Higgs boson, known as the "God Particle" because it is thought to give mass to the matter that makes up the universe.The Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory's Tevatron accelerator is competing against the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, and its grabbing the attention of particle physicists."This has been the holy grail of high energy physics for the last 30 years," said Joe Lykken, a senior...

Fermilab, the U.S. maker of the Tevatron accelerator, is claiming it's European rival, particle physics lab CERN, is rapidly losing ground in the race to discover the elusive Higgs boson, or "God particle," BBC News reported.Theoreticians predict the "God Particle" would help to explain why matter has mass and is a major goal of CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC).However, Fermilab says the odds of its detecting the famed particle first are now 50-50 at worst, and up to 96% at...

The massive particle collider built to simulate the conditions of the "Big Bang" will not restart until spring 2009 after a technical glitch forced its shutdown, according to the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN. Experts have been down into the 17-mile tunnel housing the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to see what they could determine about the damage. A helium leak into the tunnel housing, the biggest and most complex machine ever made, forced CERN to shut down its...

By EDD McCRACKEN EDINBURGH THE technology used in the search for the "God particle", which got under way in Switzerland last week, should have radical implications for how cancer is treated in Scotland, according to one of the top scientists involved in the project. Professor Peter Clarke, head of the University of Edinburgh's Institute for e-Science and a particle physicist, said the technological advances used in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), combined with the knowledge of physicists...

NOW that the euphoria and hype surrounding the search for the Higgs boson - using the Large Hadron Collider at Cern - have eased somewhat, it is perhaps opportune to raise a couple of important questions on the methodology of physical science, which seem to have been largely ignored or forgotten in the meantime. It is a tenet of the scientific method that physical experiment should be performed to test out theories, and in such manner as to be unbiased and amenable to independent...

The potential for the world's largest atom smasher to destroy Earth is one question weighing on the minds of some lay people as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) prepares to go online Wednesday. Don't worry, say the experts, who are more concerned with whether the 17 mile-long particle accelerator underground at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research near Geneva, Switzerland, will work as planned and, perhaps, reveal the existence of the so-called God particle....

By James Thalman Deseret News and Alexander G. Higgins Associated Press Moving fast enough to circle a 17-mile-long underground tunnel nearly 11,000 times a second, streams of atomic particles signaled the start of a new era of research that scientists believe could unravel the universe's deepest mysteries. At 2:28 a.m. MDT Wednesday, some 14 years and $10 billion after it was first designed, the Large Hadron Collider laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, was activated, officially becoming...