Leaked video from Cern hints that the LHC may have found a Higgs-like particle

Scientists at Cern have found a new particle, in the region where they expected to find the Higgs Boson, according to a video apparently leaked from an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider.
Video here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/large-hadron-collider/9373767/Leakedvideo-from-Cern-hints-that-the-LHC-may-have-found-a-Higgs-like-particle.html

By Tom Chivers 6:03PM BST 03 Jul 2012 17 Comments The Higgs boson, commonly nicknamed the "God particle", is the final particle predicted by the Standard Model, which is hypothesised to give other particles mass. However, Cern say that the video is one of several made to cover every possible outcome, and it is not necessarily representative of the final results to be released tomorrow. In the video, dated 4 July 2012 but released today, Joe Incandela, a spokesman for the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, said: "We've observed a new particle. We have quite strong evidence that there's something there. Its properties are still going to take us a little bit of time, but we can see that it decays to two photons, which tells us it's a boson." It is not clear, according to Prof Incandela, whether the particle is the Higgs. "It could be ultimately seen that its properties are very consistent with the Standard Model Higgs, or it could be found out that its properties don't exactly match the predictions for the Standard Model," he says. "And if that's the case, then we have something really quite profound here. It could be a gateway to the next phase of exploring the deepest fabric of the universe." He warns that it is not yet confirmed. "Obviously all of this is extremely preliminary. If you replaced every collision of the beams that we've had take place in our experiment over the last two years with a grain of sand, you'd have enough sand to fill an Olympic-sized

swimming pool. And the number of events that we've collected that we claim represent this observation are on the order of tens, or dozens."

Related Articles

Something like the Higgs boson has been found probably, according to leaked video 03 Jul 2012

Higgs Boson hunt could be over 03 Jul 2012

Higgs Boson rumours strengthened by new data 02 Jul 2012

But "if we confirm all of this, which I think we will", he says, it will be among the biggest breakthroughs in physics in decades. "This is very, very significant. It's something that may, in the end, be one of the biggest observations of any new new phenomena in our field in the last 30 or 40 years, going way back to the discovery of quarks," says Prof Incandela. A spokeswoman for Cern said: "We have recorded several videos in advance and it was a mistake that this one went live. We pre-recorded interviews with spokesmen from both experiments [CMS and Atlas] but this went live on the internet due to a technical fault." The Higgs was first proposed in the 1960s by Prof Peter Higgs. Finding it was one of the main objectives for the LHC.