July 3, 2012
New York University physicists, part of the team searching for the Higgs boson, are available for comment after the release of new data on the sub-atomic particle that is a building block of the universe.
In early July, scientists based at the CERN laboratory near Geneva are expected to unveil new findings on the search for the elusive particle. In December, researchers said they found signs of the Higgs boson’s existence and narrowed the regions in the universe where the particle could be.
“Our last result indicated there was a very strong hint that we had identified the Higgs boson, but we could not make any claims of discovery,” said NYU physicist Kyle Cranmer, one of the project’s researchers. “Today, we have twice as much data for analysis.”
Reporters wishing to speak with members of the NYU research team should contact James Devitt, NYU’s Office of Public Affairs, at 212.998.6808 or email@example.com.
The Higgs boson is named after physicist Peter Higgs, who theorized its existence more than 40 years ago as a way to explain why atoms have weight. Its discovery would provide fundamental insights into the origin of mass—specifically, why some particles have mass—and explain other scientific mysteries. It has been dubbed the “God Particle” because it is associated with an energy field that gives other particles their mass, or resistance. Its discovery was fictionalized in Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons and in the 2009 film of the same name.
For decades, physicists have been searching for the Higgs boson, the only particle of the Standard Model of Particle Physics that scientists have yet to detect. The Standard Model of Particle Physics describes the universe in terms of its fundamental particles and the forces between them. In their search, physicists have employed the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), located at the CERN laboratory. LHC, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, has enough energy to detect the remaining mass range for the Higgs boson, with December’s announcement revealing the collider’s capabilities. By colliding high-energy beams in the centers of the LHC’s particle detectors, scientists aim to make discoveries about the nature of the physical universe. The debris of the collisions reveals the nature of fundamental particle interactions and may also contain as-yet undiscovered particles.
Scientists from NYU’s Experimental High Energy Physics group are part of a world-wide collaboration to investigate the fundamental nature of matter and the basic forces that shape the universe. The collaboration, ATLAS, is based at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, that employs LHC. Members of the NYU team working on this project include: Professors Andy Haas, Peter Nemethy, and Allen Mincer as well as Cranmer and researchers Diego Casadei, Hooft van Huysduynen, Rostislav Konoplich, Attila Krasznahorkay, Sven Kreiss, George Lewis, Christopher Musso, Ricardo Neves, Kirill Prokofiev, Ben Kaplan, James Beacham, and Karthik Krishnaiyengar. For more on NYU’s involvement, go to http://physics.nyu.edu/experimentalparticle/ and click on the “Atlas” tab.
Type: Press Release
Press Contact: James Devitt | (212) 998-6808