Geneva, July 4: Science Wednesday moved one step closer to unlocking the secrets of the universe with a new particle that could be the elusive Higgs boson, the basic building block of the cosmos.
“We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature,” said Rolf Heuer, the director general of CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) said in Geneva. “The discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson opens the way to more detailed studies, requiring larger statistics, which will pin down the new particle's properties, and is likely to shed light on other mysteries of our universe,” Heuer was quoted as saying.
The action took place at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) where scientists have been tirelessly engaged in finding how the universe that we live in started with a Big Bang. The particle has been the subject of a 45-year hunt for explaining how matter attains its mass, reported BBC.
The announcement of the results at CERN, home of the LHC in Geneva, was met with loud applause and cheers.
“The results are preliminary but the 5 sigma signal at around 125 GeV we're seeing is dramatic. This is indeed a new particle. We know it must be a boson and it's the heaviest boson ever found,” said CMS experiment spokesperson Joe Incandela. CMS is one of the teams involved in the experiment.
CERN quoted Incandela as saying that the "implications are very significant and it is precisely for this reason that we must be extremely diligent in all of our studies and cross-checks”.
Peter Higgs, after whom the particle is named, wiped a tear as the presentations got over.
“I would like to add my congratulations to everyone involved in this achievement,” said. “It's really an incredible thing that it's happened in my lifetime.”
The scientists claim to have seen a “bump” in their data corresponding to a particle weighing in at 125.3 gigaelectronvolts (GeV) - about 133 times heavier than the proton at the heart of every atom.
Six theoreticians, including Peter Higgs, first proposed the Higgs in 1964.
CNN explained that the sub-atomic particle is believed to be at the base of all mass, the basic building block of the universe. IANS

Lastupdate on : Wed, 4 Jul 2012 21:30:00 Makkah time
Lastupdate on : Wed, 4 Jul 2012 18:30:00 GMT
Lastupdate on : Thu, 5 Jul 2012 00:00:00 IST