Researchers Find Evidence of How Higgs Particle Imparts Mass 91
brindafella (702231) writes Physicists at CERN's Large Hadron Colider (LHC) ATLAS experiment have been looking through their data, and have found enough of the extremely rare "W boson" (proton-proton) collisions that they can now declare their results: They have found how the Higgs imparts mass to other particles. From the article: "'Only about one in 100 trillion proton-proton collisions would produce one of these events,' said Marc-André Pleier, a physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory who played a leadership role in the analysis of this result for the ATLAS collaboration. 'You need to observe many [collisions] to see if the production rate is above or on par with predictions,' Pleier said. 'We looked through billions of proton-proton collisions produced at the LHC for a signature of these events—decay products that allow us to infer like Sherlock Holmes what happened in the event.' The analysis efforts started two years ago and were carried out in particular by groups from Brookhaven, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of Michigan, and Technische Universität Dresden, Germany."
Here's a pre-print of the paper.
like donut holes (Score:5, Funny)
The higgs particle imparts mass the same way that donut holes impart mass, but differently.
Re:like donut holes (Score:2, Funny)
Not that differently. I know that I slow down considerably when moving through a field of doughnut holes.
Re:If mass can be finally explained... (Score:5, Funny)
I'm just ready for the Higgs anti-boson diet pill......
Re:like donut holes (Score:4, Funny)
I believe that effect is also called "Timbit drag"; discovered by the great Canadian scientist Tim Horton. Incidentally, he was also the individual who discovered the effect of non-uniform doughnut hole decay; that is, the tendency of old fashioned plain doughnut hole variants to persist for hours or even days after the glazed or chocolatey variants have long since disappeared.