[MUST READ] God Particle Cause of Big Bang?

Researchers announced Friday that they detected what is believed to be the first glimpse of the Higgs boson, or God particle.

The findings come from two teams in Geneva, at the Large Hadron Collider at Cern, the European particle physics lab where the world's most powerful atom smasher is.

The Collider detectors, Atlas and CMS, detect signs of new physics by smashing subatomic particles together in an 18-mile roundd tunnel at nearly the speed of light.

The God particle is thought to give mass to the basic building blocks of nature. Research has scientists believing that the Higgs boson has a mass between 114-185GeV (gigaelectronvolts).

Both detectors reported unusual data bumps that could be a glimpse of the elusive particle. The Atlas team reported a bump between 120 and 140GeV, while CMS team found two bumps in the same region.

Although scientists maintain it's too early to conclude that the missing particle could be the cause of the bumps, for it could also be statistical fluctuations in data or flaws and glitches in the computer, it is nevertheless intriguing.

According to both Fabiola Gianotti, Atlas team's spokeswoman, and CMS spokesman Guido Tonelli, more data and combined results in the next few months would clarify the picture.

Physicist Peter Higgs first hypothesized this particle in 1964 via a theory describing how fundamental particles gain mass from an invisible field that permeates the universe.

Nobel prize winner Leon Lederman nicknamed it the God particle.


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