It’s been almost exactly two years since the announcement of the discovery of the Higgs boson. Meanwhile, Peter Higgs received the Nobel Prize for physics with François Englert for theorizing its existence but the research haven’t certainly stopped. A team of researchers of the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) experiment at CERN has just published in the journal “Nature Physics” an article that discusses more evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson, in particular its decay into fermions.
CERN scientists who work with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) (photo ©Julian Herzog) announced that operations have started to reactivate the largest particle accelerator in the world. In February 2013, the LHC was switched off in what was called “Long shutdown 1” (LS1), needed to upgrade some of the equipment and perform other maintenance tasks.
Carlo Rubbia was born on March 31, 1934 in Gorizia, Italy. As a physicist, he carried out a lot of research at CERN, where he discovered the W and Z bosons, which earned him the Nobel Prize for physics. He’s still active with various projects that go from pure physics to alternative energy.
When last year two experiments at CERN, CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) and ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus), announced the preliminary results of their research confirming the existence of the Higgs boson, everybody started expecting Peter Higgs to receive the Nobel Prize for physics. Today came the official announcement of the award to him and François Englert, the other physicist who in the ’60s published an independent work that led to very similar conclusions.
A few days ago the results of the SuperCDMS (Cryiogenic Dark Matter Search) Collaboration were presented concerning the analysis of the data obtained through silicon detectors during the CDMSII experiment for the search for dark matter. Some events are new clues to the discovery of this elusive type of matter.