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Researchers Find Evidence of How Higgs Particle Imparts Mass
brindafella (702231) writes Physicists at CERN's Large Hadron Colider (LHC) ATLAS experiment have been looking through their data, and have found enough of the extremely rare "W boson" (proton-proton) collisions that they can now declare their results: They have found how the Higgs imparts mass to other particles. From the article: "'Only about one in 100 trillion proton-proton collisions would produce one of these events,' said Marc-André Pleier, a physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory who played a leadership role in the analysis of this result for the ATLAS collaboration. 'You need to observe many [collisions] to see if the production rate is above or on par with predictions,' Pleier said. 'We looked through billions of proton-proton collisions produced at the LHC for a signature of these events—decay products that allow us to infer like Sherlock Holmes what happened in the event.' The analysis efforts started two years ago and were carried out in particular by groups from Brookhaven, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of Michigan, and Technische Universität Dresden, Germany."
Here's a pre-print of the paper.
Everytime the LHC makes the news ... I think congratulations to the EU and then I think about the Superconducting Super Collider being built in Texas which was cancelled in 1993. We should have had these breakthroughs come out 15 years ago. In the United States. Thanks Congress for slowing down the pace of physics. Much appreciated .. NOT.
ehhh ?
Given what has come out of the LHC it's been money well saved. I believe even with all the roadblocks and general BS that the government puts in the way of science and technology projects, the overall willingness to fund them and and total available funding is proportional to their return to society. Even in terms of employing physicists and maintaining our national capability to embark on cutting edge projects we would be far better off putting the money to next generation nuclear reactors/ alternative fuel reactors like Thorium.