The Philadelphia Inquirer reports on a team of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania who are working on the international effort to find the Higgs boson particle, a missing piece of physics theory.
The 27 Penn scientists involved with the project already knew half the story because they had been looking through one of two windows into the world exposed by the collider. That window, named Atlas, is a doughnut-shaped detector, 80 feet in diameter, designed to detect exotic particles like the Higgs. Another team is using a similarly large and elaborate detector called CMS. Neither team had been privy to the results of the other, but that changed Tuesday.
The Penn team were relieved to learn that the other team, operating the CMS detector, didn't present stronger, more statistically significant evidence for a Higgs particle. This represents the first particle to be found in over 16 years, and no one wants to be on the second team to find it.
Original source: The Philadelphia Inquirer
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