CERN physicists announce they are 99% certain they have found elusive Higgs boson particle

July 4, 2012 – SCIENCE – Physicists said they had discovered a new particle that is consistent with the Higgs boson, a long-sought particle crucial to scientists’ current understanding of how the universe is built, although they will need additional data to pin it down with near absolute certainty. Joe Incandela, leader of one of the teams, told scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, that the new particle was definitely a boson and the heaviest boson ever found. “The implications are very significant and it is precisely for this reason that we must be extremely diligent in all of our studies and cross-checks,” he said in a statement. The new particle found at CERN is in the mass range of 125-126 GeV, or gigaelectronvolts, which means its mass is 125-126 times greater than the mass of a proton. CERN said their data had pinned down the mass of the new particle with an extremely high level of statistical certainty. It’s hard not to get excited by these results,” CERN Research Director Sergio. However, the researchers cautioned that the current finding was still preliminary and they expect more data from additional experiments in coming months. One crucial detail would be for them to pin down specific properties that the Higgs boson is supposed to have. For example, the theory predicts it will have a spin of zero. –WSJ

Hottest temperatures ever on Earth: On June 25, 2012, scientists created the hottest temperature ever in the lab — 4 trillion degrees Celsius — hot enough to break matter down into the kind of soup that existed microseconds after the birth of the universe. They used a giant atom smasher at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York to knock gold ions together to make the ultra-hot explosions — which lasted only for milliseconds. But that is enough to give physicists fodder for years of study that they hope will help them understand why and how the universe formed. “That temperature is hot enough to melt protons and neutrons,” Brookhaven’s Steven Vigdor told a news conference at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Washington on June 25, 2012. These particles make up atoms, but they are themselves made up of smaller components called quarks and gluons. What the physicists are looking for are tiny irregularities that can explain why matter clumped out of the primeval hot soup. “They also hope to use their findings for more practical applications — such as in the field of “spintronics” that aims to make smaller, faster and more powerful computing devices. They used the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a particle accelerator and collider that is 2.4 mile around and buried 12 feet underground in Upton, New York to collide gold ions billions of times. “RHIC was designed to create matter at temperatures first encountered in the early universe,” Vigdor said. They calculate the 4 trillion degree temperature gets pretty close. “How hot is it?” he asked. In comparison, “The predicted melting temperature of protons and neutrons is 2 trillion degrees. The temperatures at the core of a typical type-2 supernova is 2 billion degrees,” he said. The center of our sun is 50 million degrees, iron melts at 1,800 degrees and the average temperature of the universe is now 0.7 of a degree above absolute zero. Physicists at the Brookhaven National Laboratory smashed gold ions together to produce a quark-gluon plasma like that which they say existed in the first instant after the Big Bang that created the universe, and in doing so have produced what Guinness World Records says is the highest man-made temperature ever, 7.2 trillion degrees. That is about 250,000 times hotter than the temperature at the core of the Sun. –Reuters

                                                                video recorded July 2011