Mar 16 2013
Julia Thom-Levy, an associate professor of physics at Cornell University, is an expert in experimental elementary particle physics, and involved in data analysis at the Compact Muon Soleniod experiment at the Large Hadron Collider LHC at CERN.
She comments on reports this week from CERN researchers that a new particle observed last year is almost certainly the much-sought Higgs boson, the particle believed to give others their mass.
Julia Thom-Levy says:
“New data combined with preliminary results from last year indicates that we have discovered a Higgs boson-like particle at the LHC. As one colleague put it – it's been walking and quacking like a duck for more than half a year now, and it's time to say that it's a duck.
“This doesn't mean we are done; there are many subtle effects we need to investigate to understand the Higgs particle properties, and we may still observe surprising results as the measurement uncertainties become smaller and smaller.
“The past teaches us that sometimes the devil is in the details.”
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