EUREKA

New Clues to the ‘God Particle’

Elusive Higgs boson gives objects their mass.

Have we finally found the God particle? Physicists from the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois have found data that corroborates an experiment last December at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, that may have detected the Higgs boson, the hypothetical particle that gives objects their mass, commonly known as the “God particle.” That group found intriguing bumps in their data at masses of 124 billion electron volts and 126 billion electron volts, while the Fermilab team detected a bump in the same region. “Based on the current Tevatron data and results compiled through December 2011 by other experiments, this is the strongest hint of the existence of a Higgs boson,” said the Fermilab report. The boson is implied by the Standard Model of physics, which has been used for high-energy physics for the last several decades, but it has never been observed.