Higgs Boson: A 50-Year Walk From Theory to Reality

Scientists at CERN announced Thursday that it’s almost 100% certain that they have found the elusive Higgs boson – a crucial piece of the puzzle when it comes to explain why the universe has mass.

As Tim Barlow, an experimental physicist with the ATLAS Experiment who's based at Stanford University's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, put it: “The probability that last year's data identifying the Higgs boson was a statistical fluke—and that researchers hadn't discovered the long-sought particle — is now becoming astronomically low.”

On the Thursday’s announcement at the annual Moriond Conference in Italy, scientists from CERN pointed that certain key properties of the particle they found last year are so far consistent with what is predicted by the so-called Standard Model of particle physics.

For instance, the Higgs boson is postulated to have no rotation, or "spin," and in the Standard Model its parity—a measure of how the particle's mirror image behaves—should be positive.

And according to a statement by Dave Charlton, spokesperson for CERN's ATLAS project, the data is consistent with that.
"[The latest data] points to the new particle having the spin-parity of a Higgs boson as in the Standard Model.”

ATLAS and the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) are the two experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that are searching for signs of the Higgs boson.

This scientific community – known for its modus operandi which is fundamentally rooted on skepticism – seems be lowering the guard on the face of what many Physicists call evidence compelling enough.

“Some scientists have thrown caution to the wind and have stopped referring to the new particle as being merely ‘Higgs-like’ and just calling it the Higgs boson,” CMS spokesperson Joe Incandela said.

"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," Incandela said in a statement.

Though a full picture of the Higgs boson is yet to emerge, Peter Higgs – who proposed the idea in the 60s – is a vindicated man.

The British Theoretical Physicist proposal of broken symmetry in electroweak theory, explaining the origin of mass of elementary particles in general and of the W and Z bosons in particular, took about 50 years to be experimentally proven. But, its increasingly clear now that "the most sought-after particle in modern physics," has been found.