Margaret Thatcher was many things – including a scientist. And, thanks to her scientific inclination, she was one of the first people to be told about the discovery of the W boson at CERN. Thatcher visited the UA1 experiment, which ran on CERN’s Super Proton Synchrotron, in August 1982. She kept her visit low-key, reportedly asking to [...]

Tomorrow afternoon, in “the most eagerly awaited scientific presentation of the century to date”, particle physics laboratory Cern will update the world on its search for the Higgs boson, that elusive particle that is believed to give mass to fundamental particles. The Higgs is the only particle predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics, [...]

Every year the Royal College of Science Union at Imperial College runs an essay competition called the Science Challenge. There are usually four questions to answer and a number of prizes for the essays that answer them best. I’ve been shortlisted before, but this year I finally won something — the Physics prize. Check out [...]

When last we checked in on the hunt for the Higgs, physicists weren’t yet ready to call the deal done. They were only willing to say that they had discovered a new particle—some sort of boson—and that this new boson was “Higgs-like.” Their reticence hinged on the measurement of the new particle’s spin, a fundamental [...]

A month ago scientists at the Large Hadron Collider released the latest Higgs boson results. And although the data held few obvious surprises, most intriguing were the results that scientists didn’t share. The original Higgs data from back in July had shown that the Higgs seemed to be decaying into two photons more often than [...]

This past July, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider announced that they had discovered a new particle that looked much like the long-sought-after Higgs boson. In fact, the Higgs-like particle they found was nearly perfect—based on the available data, it looked almost exactly like what the Standard Model of Particle Physics predicts the Higgs to [...]

A new discovery at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva casts a shadow across a hypothetical realm of particle physics that many had hoped would be the collider’s next major exploration after the apparently successful hunt for the Higgs boson. Physicists working with the collider’s LHC beauty, or LHCb, detector have observed a new kind [...]

By now the huge Higgs news out of CERN is no longer news. The apparent discovery of the Higgs boson has been rehashed countless times in the three-plus weeks since physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) outside Geneva announced they had found a new particle with a strong resemblance to the long-sought Higgs. What [...]

Felicitas Pauss, head of international relations at CERN in Geneva, asked for a show of hands from the audience of young scientists: Who worked on the ATLAS or CMS instruments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, or LHC? Many hands went up for each. And who worked as a theorist? More hands appeared—hundreds in all. Last, [...]

With excitement building about an announcement due tomorrow from scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider, today’s Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting talks kicked off with the Higgs, explored some mysterious anomalies with neutrinos and looked forward to some practical applications of spintronics coming soon in information and communication technologies. (You can read all our coverage [...]

With instruments offering “tantalizing hints” in support of the Higgs boson, the elementary particle thought to endow matter with mass, we stand at a singular moment in time for physics. Will we get sufficient evidence to confirm the existence of the Higgs, thus helping to complete the decades-old Standard Model? Will science have to go [...]

VANCOUVER—Last fall, the Tevatron accelerator at Fermilab in Illinois shut down for good. The long-running accelerator had been eclipsed by the vastly more powerful Large Hadron Collider outside of Geneva, Switzerland, which since 2010 has been generating data at an impressive rate. The move appeared to quash any hopes that Fermilab had of discovering the Higgs [...]

Europe’s Large Hadron Collider, already the most powerful particle collider in history—and by a wide margin at that—is about to break its own record. The collider outside Geneva will run at an energy of 4 trillion electron-volts (TeV) in 2012, up from 3.5 TeV in 2011, CERN announced February 13. (CERN is the European physics [...]