Two large collaborations of scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland made worldwide news in July 2012 when they announced independent observations of the elusive Higgs boson particle — a discovery hailed as one of the greatest scientific accomplishments of recent decades.
This so-called “God particle” was first postulated some 50 years ago as a crucial element of the modern theory of the forces of nature — it is, physicists say, what gives everything in the universe mass — and it had been the subject of worldwide searches ever since. (more…)
Greg Landsberg, professor of physics at Brown, is the physics coordinator for the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) at CERN in Switzerland, part of a Brown team that includes professors David Cutts, Ultich Heintz, and Meenakshi Narain. The giant instrument’s primary mission is finding the Higgs boson, a particle whose existence would confirm the best guess physicists have made about why things have mass.
On July 4, Landsberg and his colleagues will reveal the latest results of their search. Anything could happen when Greg Landsberg and, including an announcement that the Higgs has been found or that it has been ruled out, sending theorists back to the whiteboard. Landsberg spoke by Skype with science news officer David Orenstein on June 26 as CERN physicists were preparing for their press conference. (more…)
