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BBC News Science & Environment 4 July 2012 Last updated at 07:35 GMT Higgs boson-like particle discovery claimed at LHC Comments (43) By Paul Rincon Science editor, BBC News website, Geneva Cern scientists revealing results from the Large Hadron Collider have claimed the discovery of a new particle consistent with the Higgs boson. The particle has been the subject of a 45-year hunt to explain how matter attains its mass. Both of the two Higgs-hunting experiments at the LHC on the Franco-Swiss border have reached a level of certainty worthy of a "discovery". More work will be needed to be certain that what they see is a Higgs, however. Both teams claimed they had seen a "bump" in their data corresponding to a particle weighing in at about 125-126 gigaelectronvolts (GeV) - about 130 times heavier than the proton at the heart of every atom. The results announced at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) were met with thunderous applause. At the meeting, Prof Peter Higgs, the former University of Edinburgh theoretician who with five others predicted the Higgs particle's existence in 1964, praised the efforts of the LHC teams. "It's really an incredible thing its happened in my lifetime," he said. The CMS team claimed that by combining two of its data sets, they had attained a confidence level just at the "five-sigma" point - about a one-in-3.5 million chance that the signal they see would appear if there were no Higgs particle. However, a full combination of the CMS data brings that number just back to 4.9 sigma - a one-in-2 million chance. Joe Incandela, spokesman for CMS, was unequivocal. "The results are preliminary but the five-sigma signal at around 125 GeV we're seeing is dramatic. This is indeed a new particle," he told the Geneva meeting. Fabiola Gianotti, spokeswoman for the Atlas experiment, announced even more irrefutable results. "We observe in our data clear signs of a new particle, at the level of five sigma, in the mass region around 126 GeV," she said. Massive problem Anticipation had been high and rumours were rife before the announcement. Indications are strong, but it remains to be seen whether the particle the team reports is in fact the simplest "standard model" Higgs, rather than something more complex - and those answers will certainly not come on Wednesday. Cern director-general Rolf Heuer summed up the two presentations succinctly, saying: "I think we have it - we have a discovery. We have an observation consistent with a Higgs boson - but which one?" A confirmation would be one of the biggest scientific discoveries of the century; the hunt for the Higgs has been compared by some physicists to the Apollo programme that reached the Moon in the 1960s. Two different experiment teams at the LHC observe a signal in the same part of the "search region" for the Higgs - at a rough mass of 125 GeV. Hints of the particle, revealed to the world by teams at the LHC in December 2011, have since strengthened markedly. The $10bn LHC is the most powerful particle accelerator ever built: it smashes two beams of protons together at close to the speed of light with the aim of revealing new phenomena in the wreckage of the collisions. The Atlas and CMS experiments, which were designed to hunt for the Higgs at the LHC, each detect a signal with a statistical certainty of more than 4.5 sigma. Five sigma is the generally accepted benchmark for claiming the discovery of a new particle. It equates to a one in 3.5 million chance that there is no Higgs and the "bump" in the data is down to some statistical fluctuation. Prof Stefan Soldner-Rembold, from the University of Manchester, told BBC News earlier this week: "The evidence is piling up... everything points in the direction that the Higgs is there." The Higgs is the cornerstone of the Standard Model - the most successful theory to explain the workings of the Universe. But most researchers now regard the Standard Model as a stepping stone to some other, more complete theory, which can explain phenomena such as dark matter and dark energy. Scientists will look at how the new particle decays -or transforms - into other, more stable particles after being produced in collisions at the LHC to figure out whether the particle they see is the version of the Higgs predicted by the Standard Model or something more exotic. . "We'll look at how often it decays into a pair of photons, how often it decays into Z bosons, how often it decays into W bosons," said Dr Tara Shears, from the University of Liverpool. "It could match what the Standard Model predicts, but if there are deviations, that means there is new physics at work. That would be the first glimpse through the window at what lies beyond our current understanding." 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