Thursday, August 2, 2012

Even More Evidence of the Higgs Boson

Now there's only a one-in-300,000,000 chance the Higgs Boson doesn't exist. The team at the  Large Hadron Collider that previously discovered the Higgs had achieved only a "5 sigma" level of certainty, the minimum to claim a discovery, the BBC explains. That amounts to a one-in-3.5 million chance the particle doesn't exist. Now they're up to one in 300 million.

It's impossible to directly observe the particle, which exists for only a fraction of a second before decaying into something else. But the team has been conducting more analysis on these "decay channels," and as a result has boosted its certainty up to 5.9 sigma. Still, the particle may not be the exact Higgs boson theorists have always imagined; the researchers have been careful at all turns to call it only a "Higgs-like" particle until more analysis can be done.

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