Quote (hk_nobody @ Dec 18 2011 08:16am)

so those guys in Europe found the higgs-boson particles with the LHC. Although the data is only 95% significant not the usual 99.95%, but it is most likely that it is true.

What is the significance of such discovery? why are people spending so much on looking for these particles? how is it going to change our daily lives?

Quote

The Higgs particle is a hypothetical massive scalar elementary particle theorized by Robert Brout, François Englert, Peter Higgs, Gerald Guralnik, C. R. Hagen, and Tom Kibble in 1964 (see 1964 PRL symmetry breaking papers) and is a key building block in the Standard Model.[12][13][14][15] It has no intrinsic spin, and for that reason is classified as a boson (like the gauge bosons, which have integer spin). Because an exceptionally large amount of energy and beam luminosity are theoretically required to observe a Higgs boson in high energy colliders, it is the only fundamental particle predicted by the Standard Model that has yet to be observed.

The Higgs boson plays a unique role in the Standard Model, by explaining why the other elementary particles, except the photon and gluon, are massive. In particular, the Higgs boson would explain why the photon has no mass, while the W and Z bosons are very heavy. Elementary particle masses, and the differences between electromagnetism (mediated by the photon) and the weak force (mediated by the W and Z bosons), are critical to many aspects of the structure of microscopic (and hence macroscopic) matter. In electroweak theory, the Higgs boson generates the masses of the leptons (electron, muon, and tau) and quarks.

As yet, no experiment has conclusively detected the existence of the Higgs boson. It is hoped that the Large Hadron Collider at CERN will confirm the existence of this particle. As of August 2011, a significant portion of the possible masses for the Higgs have been excluded at 95% confidence level: CMS has excluded the mass ranges 145-216 GeV, 226-288 GeV and 310-400 GeV,[16] while the ATLAS experiment has excluded 146-232 GeV, 256-282 GeV and 296-466 GeV.[17] Note that these exclusions apply only to the Standard Model Higgs, and that more complex Higgs sectors which are possible in Beyond the Standard Model scenarios may be significantly more difficult to characterize. CERN director general Rolf Heuer has predicted that by the end of 2012 either the Standard Model Higgs boson will be observed, or excluded in all mass ranges, implying that the Standard Model is not the whole story.[18]

On December 13th 2011 CERN announced that both ATLAS and CMS experiments had detected 'hints' of the Higgs boson in at approximately 124GeV. These results were not sufficiently strong to announce that the Higgs boson had been found (ATLAS showed a 2.3 sigma level of certainty for an excess at 126GeV, while CMS showed a 1.9 sigma level excess at 124GeV) but the fact that two separate experiments show excesses in the same energy range has led to much excitement in the particle physics world.

Quote (bentherdonethat @ Dec 18 2011 09:02pm)