The Elusive Particle: 5 Implications of Finding Higgs Boson
Physicists at the world’s largest atom smasher announced July 4 that they are more than 99 percent sure they’ve found a new, and heavy, boson particle, that may be the Higgs boson.
Two experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland, show this new particle has a mass of about 125 GeV, with 1 gigaelectron volt about the mass of a proton. The LHC is the most powerful machine on Earth, capable of producing huge explosions of energy that generate new and exotic particles inside the 17-mile (27 kilometer) loop underneath Switzerland and France.
If the discovery can be confirmed as the Higgs boson, it will have wide wide-reaching implications. Here are five of the biggest…