Eureka! Higgs Boson Discovery Confirmed After Analysing Additional Data

Physicists from Large Hadron Collider said that they have new evidence that shows that the particle discovered in July 2012 is indeed the Higgs Boson- the subatomic particle that's associated with mechanism that gives mass to particles. The next step, physicists say, will be to identify the type of Higgs Boson.

However, researchers say that whether the current particle is the one postulated by the Standard Model or is something beyond the model isn't yet known. The Standard Model theorizes that the Higgs Boson will have no spin and its parity should be positive (parity is the measure of behavior of its mirror images). Physicists have found a similar no spin and positive parity in this particle, strongly suggesting that this is indeed the Higgs Boson.

Researchers said that they have now analyzed two and a half times more data than what was available during July, 2012- when CERN scientists had first reported the discovery of the particle from LHC.

"The preliminary results with the full 2012 data set are magnificent and to me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson though we still have a long way to go to know what kind of Higgs boson it is," Joe Incandela, spokesperson for CMS said in a statement.

The preliminary data that confirms the finding of the Higgs Boson was presented at the Moriond Conference by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

"The beautiful new results represent a huge effort by many dedicated people. They point to the new particle having the spin-parity of a Higgs boson as in the Standard Model. We are now well started on the measurement programme in the Higgs sector," said Dave Charlton, spokesperson for ATLAS.

To determine if this is the Standard Model Higgs boson, the collaborations have, for example, to measure precisely the rate at which the boson decays into other particles and compare the results to the predictions. The detection of the boson is a very rare event - it takes around 1 trillion (1012) proton-proton collisions for each observed event. To characterize all of the decay modes will require much more data from the LHC.