14 DAY TRIAL // Scientists operating the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), underneath the French-Swiss border, have just published new research papers, bumping up the certainty level concerning the discovery of the Higgs boson.
The ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus) paper shows the team increased its certainty (sigma) level from 5.0 to 5.9, a tremendously large bump considering what's at stake here. The Higgs boson is the theorized, fifth force carrier, which binds all components of the Standard Model together.
In the second paper, the team managing the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment maintained its previous sigma level, between 4.9 and 5.0. In scientific terms, a sigma-1 level is allotted to wild speculations, whereas sigma-6 is awarded to scientific fact.
This is precisely the type of studies the LHC was developed for. The main purpose of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) facility is to detect the Higgs boson, and possibly discover signs of supersymmetry, PhysOrg reports.