Physicists announced on Wednesday March 6 that they are even closer to finding the Higgs boson, also known as the "God particle."
The announcement was made by over 15 scientists from CERN through a live webcast from the Rencontres de Moriond. The event is an annual particle physics forum held in La Thuile, Italy since 1966. While more data will be presented over the coming weeks, the scientists stated that new data suggests the particle does exist with the properties expected.
"Since the properties of the new particle appear to be very close to the ones predicted for the SM Higgs, I have personally no further doubts," Dr. Guido Tonelli, former spokesperson of the CMS detector at CERN, told "The Hindu."
The forum runs from March 2 to 16 and includes information found on other particles as well.
CERN operates the largest and most expensive particle accelerator in the world, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The organization announced that it spotted a Higgs boson-like particle on July 4, 2012 and has continued to run experiments ever since. Discovering the Higgs boson would mean uncovering the one area missing from the theory that explains modern particle physics. Given the new information, scientists are now 99.6 percent sure they've found the Higgs boson, but they want to be 99.9 percent sure.
"Until we can confidently tie down the particle's spin, the particle will remain Higgs-like," CERN research director Sergio Bertolucci said in a statement Wednesday. "Only when we know that it has spin-zero will we be able to call it a Higgs."
Whether or not the particle is in fact a Higgs boson will depend on its spin. Spin-zero means that it is a Higgs boson. Spin-two means something else.
Based on the new data, it remains to be seen if the particle is in fact a Higgs boson and whether CERN will ever find one is still unknown.
