Read the 2013 update on the discovery of the Higgs boson.

Update on the Higgs Discovery

In early November 2000, CERN ended its one month extension of the LEP experiment. The extension had been granted with the hope of clearing up the somewhat ambiguous situation concerning the Higgs discovery. The final results are in and the situation has not been clarified. There are four clean candidate events leading to about 95% confidence that the Higgs has been seen. Because of the extraordinary importance of the Higgs, CERN experimentalists are unable to definitively say that they have uncovered the particle. If they have succeeded, the Higgs mass is around 115 GeV/c2 (for comparative purposes the mass of the proton is 0.94 GeV/c2).

      CERN now begins construction of the LHC (large hadronic collider), which could not be delayed further. It will take about five years to build and allow scientists to explore higher energies, make new discoveries (including that of the Higgs particle), and to probe new short-distance properties of nature.



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