The Large Hadron Collider is a 17-mile (27-kilometer) loop buried underneath France and Switzerland, run by CERN, based in Geneva. Beams of particles are sent racing around the tunnel and at four separate locations will be crashing into each other to see what comes out.
The Higgs boson is a hypothetical massive elementary particle that is predicted to exist by the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics. The Higgs boson is an integral part of the theoretical Higgs mechanism. If shown to exist, it would help explain why other elementary particles have mass.
There are two teams working at CERN’s underground Large Hadron Collider. Both teams have detected signs of the Higgs boson, widely described as the most coveted prize in particle physics. But the scientists say they have not yet proved the particle exists.
Both experiments, which involve about 5000 scientists altogether, showed signals for a mass between 115 and 130 GeV — the lower end of the range scanned by the scientists — that could indicate the presence of a new particle.
Heuer has warned that not enough data has been collected to make statistically sure that the apparent "Higgs boson" signals they saw are not due to fluctuations in background signals caused by other particles and processes. There data so far is based on a very small number of signals.
The Large Hadron Collider collides protons together at a set energy level. The collision is then expected to produce Higgs bosons, which have an unknown mass. Protons are the building blocks of atoms made up of particles called quarks and gluons.
The Higgs boson and its related Higgs field were predicted in 1964 by physicist Peter Higgs and his colleagues. Though the Higgs mechanism is the best explanation for why particles have mass, it can’t be trusted until its major prediction — the Higgs boson — is found.
