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Scientists at the CERN nuclear research facility have almost certainly found the Higgs boson, the so-called "God particle," they have announced.

This morning the leaders of the experiments running through the giant Large Hadron Collider (LHC) said that their two teams had independently observed a particle consistent with the Higgs, which has until now been theoretical rather than a sure thing. The Higgs boson is thought to be responsible for mass in the otherwise-already-proven standard model of physics.

"We have observed a new boson," Joe Incandela, leader of the CMS experiment said at a press conference … Read more

An apparently leaked video dated for dissemination tomorrow depicts a CERN representative involved with one of the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider saying that "we've observed a new particle," which he goes on to label "one of the biggest discoveries in our field in the last 30 to 40 years."

"It's something that may, in the end, be one of the biggest observations of any new new phenomena in our field in the last 30 or 40 years, going way back to the discovery of quarks, for example," the spokesman, Jo … Read more

Fireworks. Hot dogs. Beach blankets. Particle physics.

July 4 this year won't be just about Americans celebrating Independence Day and unofficially kicking off the the summer vacation season. It could also bring news of some significance from physicists in Europe who've been in hot pursuit of a mysterious subatomic particle known as the Higgs boson -- and a better glimpse at the nature of the universe.

The big-brain folks at CERN on Wednesday will be holding a seminar at which they plan to provide an update on the Higgs search, divulging the preliminary results of their 2012 data … Read more

Neutrinos can't travel faster than the speed of light after all.

CERN has confirmed that an initial reading, which recorded neutrinos -- nearly mass-less subatomic particles -- sent from CERN to the Gran Sasso laboratory as moving faster than light, was based off of a "faulty element" with the experiment's fiber-optic timing system.

The results, presented today at the International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics in Kyoto, Japan, closes the chapter on a highly surprising finding last year that challenged the conventional wisdom of physics. The results quickly faced public scrutiny.

"Although this result … Read more

The European nuclear research agency CERN collided two high-power proton beams in the early hours of Thursday morning, marking the beginning of this year's Large Hadron Collider physics data collection.

The colliding beams were each of an intensity of 4 teraelectronvolts (TeV), and the resulting 8 TeV collision energy is the most powerful the particle accelerator has managed yet. In 2011's experiments, collisions went up to 7 TeV and, following the 20-month shut-down that will take place from November, CERN hopes to achieve LHC collision energy of 13 then 14 TeV.

"The experience of two good years … Read more

New experimental evidence is helping disprove last year's highly surprising finding of neutrinos breaking established physics laws by traveling faster than light.

The finding involved clocking the neutrinos--tiny, nearly massless subatomic particles--as they traveled from the CERN particle accelerator near Geneva to the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy, about 730km away. An experiment called Opera found the neutrinos taking less time to arrive than light would, but now another Gran Sasso experiment, Icarus, showed neutrinos making the journey at a more sedate pace under light speed, CERN said.

That finding comes after news in February that a fiber-optic connection problem … Read more

Physicists based in the U.S. today presented evidence of the Higgs boson particle that correlates closely with European researchers' work at the Large Hadron Collider.

Researchers released an analysis of 10 years worth of data from the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, which provide more hints of the Higgs boson, but not a conclusive finding.

The data, presented at a physics conference in Italy, indicate that the particle could exist at a mass of between 115 gigaelectronvolts and 135 gigaelectronvolts. This result is consistent with the last December's finding from CERN's Large Hadron Collider in … Read more

A relatively mundane data-link problem could explain last year's surprising finding that subatomic particles called neutrinos appeared to violate physics laws by traveling faster than the speed of light.

Problems with a fiber-optic link in the Opera experiment "could have led to an underestimate of the time of flight of the neutrinos," CERN, the European nuclear physics center that generated the neutrinos for the experiment, said in a statement today. The fiber fed GPS location data into the experiment's master clock.

Too short a travel time to the destination--Italy's National Institute of Nuclear Physics lab … Read more

Researchers at the CERN particle accelerator have found "intriguing hints" of the Higgs boson, a moment of major progress in years of previously unfruitful searching for the elusive subatomic particle.

The search for the Higgs boson is the top priority of CERN's massive and expensive Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland. Its Atlas experiment showed a statistically suspicious increase in activity that indicates the Higgs could be pinned down with a mass of 126 giga-electron-volts, and showing some important agreement, its independent CMS experiment found a possible result nearby at 124GeV.

"We observe an excess of … Read more