Higgs Boson discovered?

The elusive subatomic particle, dubbed "the God particle" or something that looks a lot like it, has been finally found, according to an announcement by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), whose particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), spans many kilometers underground the French-Swiss border near Geneva.

"We observe in our data clear signs of a new particle, at the level of 5 sigma, in the mass region around 126 GeV. The outstanding performance of the LHC and ATLAS and the huge efforts of many people have brought us to this exciting stage", said ATLAS experiment spokesperson Fabiola Gianotti, "but a little more time is needed to prepare these results for publication".

"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. "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".

While the implications of this discovery are yet to be refined there is almost no doubt that it will strongly affect our understanding of nature confirming the theoretical set of the so-called Standard Model of particle physics.

The unification theory or Theory of Everything (ToE), which would fuse particle physics and space-time (and gravity) physics described in Einstein's General Relativity is still out of our immediate reach, however consolidating the Standard Model should provide more solid basis for such efforts.

The Higgs Boson is involved in the Higgs mechanism: the why behind particle mass.