CLOSE BUT no cigar. We will have to wait until next year to discover whether the mysterious Higgs atomic particle actually exists.
Particle physicists around the world held their collective breath yesterday as scientists at the Cern nuclear research centre on the French-Swiss border delivered the latest research findings on the Higgs. They had just spent a year smashing atomic particles together in an attempt to pinpoint the elusive Higgs, but their quarry continues to elude them.
The results from one of the huge machines at Cern, the aptly named Atlas experiment, showed there was a hint of something, but it was a promise not quite delivered.
It showed a number of what Cern described yesterday as “tantalising” indications of the secretive Higgs, but without actually confirming that it had bagged one. Perhaps disappointingly, the results from another Cern experiment, CMS, showed nothing or almost nothing at all.
Cern officials said that the findings, made using months of high energy collision data collected on its Large Hadron Collider, were “sufficient to make significant progress in the search for the Higgs boson, but not enough to make any conclusive statement on the existence or non-existence of the elusive Higgs”.
Scientists really must determine whether the Higgs boson is real or just the figment of a theoretical physicist’s imagination.
It is the key that either proves or disproves a grand unified theory called the standard model that explains the nature of atoms but also the formation of the universe, said particle physicist Dr Tara Shears of the University of Liverpool, a research participant in both Atlas and another experiment called LHCb.
There is a large element of luck to finding the thing, said Dr Ronan McNulty of University College Dublin who leads Ireland’s only experimental particle physics group and its involvement with the collider.
He was bullish about the findings however. “It had everyone saying it looks like, it smells like a Higgs. What it really says is the amount of data we need to see it is four times the amount of data we have.”
This makes the “luck factor” go up, he said. It will be “decided in 2012” when the fresh data arrives, collected by the LHC from March next year after its winter servicing break.
Irish scientists may find themselves directly involved in the discovery with funding provided by Science Foundation Ireland. Dr McNulty’s group is analysing data from the LHCb experiment and it too could help find the Higgs – if it is there at all.
Watch this space.