The so-called 'god particle' -- have they found it, or not? Speculation has been growing as physicists from around the world converge on Melbourne for the International Conference for High Energy Physics and an eagerly anticipated announcement from CERN (which houses the LHC).
At 7 pm NZT on Wed 4 July, CERN will release the latest update in the search for the Higgs in a scientific seminar held jointly in Geneva and Melbourne via a live two-way link.
A press conference will follow at 8 pm NZT which will be available to watch online. The SMC will round up reaction comments for release as soon as possible thereafter.
To help reporters covering the Higgs announcement, the Science Media Centre global network has pulled together a range of resources, including a media briefing, fact sheet, animation and comments.
The AusSMC will hold a background briefing at 1 pm (NZT) Wed 4 July to help media prepare for the announcement later in the day.
The briefing will discuss:
- What is Higgs boson?
- Why have physicists been looking for evidence of Higgs boson for 50 years?
- If proven to exist, how will Higgs boson change our knowledge of the world?
- Will there be any practical implications if the Higgs boson is shown to exist?
The following comments are available for your use in the build-up to the announcement. We will gather further reaction comments and send these out as soon as possible after tomorrow's press conference.
Dr David Krofcheck, Senior Lecturer, Department of Physics, University of Auckland, says:
"Last December I was in the CERN auditorium listening to excruciatingly tantalising results presented by the big experiments, CMS and ATLAS, about a new particle. Their combined results fell short of a discovery, but the audience still gave a long and loud ovation to the speakers. The December results looked a lot like what theorists expected for a Higgs boson.
"I am very excited to see the new 2012 results on the Higgs search. With luck the small signal revealed in the December talks will have grown to something unambiguous. If so, this would be a once in a generation type of discovery as the Higgs boson would complete what physicists call the Standard Model.
"The American accelerator at Fermilab also announced yesterday that they have similar data, combined from 2001 to the present, for such a particle in the same mass range as reported at CERN. Fermilab physicists mentioned 115-135 times the mass of a proton, while the CMS/ATLAS results were a little tighter around 125 times the mass of a single proton for the alleged new particle. We need to be careful until the CERN full 2012 data set is presented."
"Cross your fingers!"
Prof Dan Tovey, Professor of Particle Physics at the University of Sheffield, told the UK SMC:
(In response to Fermilab's Tevatron results released last night)
"These intriguing hints from the Tevatron appear to support the results from the LHC shown at CERN in December. The results are particularly important because they use a completely different and complementary way of searching for the Higgs boson. This gives us more confidence that what we are seeing is really evidence of new physics rather than just a statistical fluke. We will need to wait until Wednesday and the latest results from the LHC before getting the full picture however."
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Additional resources:
A helpful fact sheet on the Higgs boson from the Canadian Science Media Centre is available
on their website. The AusSMC will be producing an animation for online media use (contact us for a copy)
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