The head of Cern has challenged premature claims that his scientists have discovered the most sought after particle in physics: the Higgs boson. Rolf Heuer, director-general of Cern, told the Europhysics conference in Grenoble that data from smashing protons together at the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, show “intriguing fluctuations” – but these “hints” should not be interpreted as discovery of the Higgs, the particle that gives matter its mass.“Maybe the younger scientists need to be a little more patient,” Prof Heuer told the meeting. “I think journalists might also learn a little about patience.” He said it might take until the end of next year for scientists either to confirm the existence of the Higgs particle and nail down its properties or to decide that it does not exist after all.
The Higgs is sometimes called “the God particle” in the media – to the irritation of most physicists – though it is named officially after Peter Higgs of Edinburgh University, who proposed its existence in the 1960s. It is the last unproven prediction of the “standard model” of physics and, if it turns out not to exist, then the whole theoretical framework of physics will have to be rethought.
Discovering a new subatomic particle such as Higgs is a painstaking process of statistical analysis of the seething subatomic debris resulting from billions of collisions. Two of the LHC’s huge subterranean particle detectors, known as Atlas and CMS, have generated patterns that could represent the disintegration of Higgs bosons – and, on the other side of the Atlantic, so has the older and less powerful US Tevatron machine. But the results are not conclusive, either individually or collectively.
“Rolf Heuer is right to be cautious,” said Dave Charlton, a physics professor at Birmingham University and a senior member of the Atlas team. “The fluctuations, or ‘bumps’, in the data are intriguing, but we cannot say they are very conclusive.”
The LHC, which was built in a 27km underground ring at a total cost of $8bn, has far more than Higgs in its sights for the next 20 years of operation. Other potential discoveries beyond the standard model include the existence of hidden dimensions of space, beyond the three in which we live; new families of subatomic “superparticles”; and particles called gravitons that transmit the force of gravity.