Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Happy Higgs Day!

It's now official: the experiments at LHC have discovered the Higgs particle. Depending on how you slice and dice the numbers, they just meet the "5 sigma" criterion to claim discovery. Combined, they will certainly exceed that, but the official combination won't be available for a while. In the meantime, here's the unofficial combination.
 
The new particle has a mass of about 125 GeV  (about 125 times heavier than the proton). You can read a brief description of the significance of this discovery here, but if you want the full story, read the book.