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Discovery Center > News > 2011 > Fencing in the Higgs

2011-08-25

Fencing in the Higgs

The elusive Higgs particle is running out of places to hide. The Higgs is the missing link in the Standard Model for particle physics, namely the mechanism that provides mass to all the other particles in the world.

A Higgs candidate from the ATLAS experiment

But it is only a conjecture and its existence has not yet been proven. However, solid evidence for its existence or non-existence is almost assured within the next twelve months. Already now, at a conference in Mumbai, the LHC experiments can narrow down the possible existence of a Higgs particle to a mass interval between 114 GeV and 145 GeV.

In this interval the experiments also find a small excess of events, far from enough to claim a discovery, but enough to create hectic excitement among the physicists. The Discovery center provides input to the search by counting possible tau-tau and ZZ decays of the Higgs and look forward to a very exiting year to come with the prospects of quadrupling the data from LHC.