There are increasingly strong rumours that the Higgs boson has finally been detected at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland. Officials from Cern are believed to be preparing to announce a significant step forward in the next week.
Don’t expect anyone to hold up a jar with a Higgs boson inside. Instead, the discovery is likely to take the form of the first real proof that the so-called ‘God particle’ is real. There will be more work to be done, but the announcement is expected to be the first real indication that the LHC is on the right track. If this is the case, it will be a boost for the standard model of particle physics.
Defining the Higgs boson is difficult because no-one really knows what it is, just what it (supposedly) does. Experts have been slowly focusing on the energy range where they expect to detect the Higgs boson in the aftermath of a particle collision, with that range now down to around 120 to 125 GeV (gigelectronvolts), where one GeV is roughly the mass of a proton.