Scientists working at the large Hadron collider in Geneva, Switzerland believe they have found what is referred to as the 'God' particle, a tiny, subatomic particle that researchers believe explains how mass was created and is maintained.
Also called the Higgs boson, physicists have been searching for the particle for decades. The research has greatly accelerated in recent years with the construction of the Hadron collider, a huge underground instrument that accelerates matter and is used by physicists to study subatomic particles.
Researchers at CERN, the organization that built and uses the Hadron collider, announced their findings in a press release Wednesday.
"This is indeed a new particle. We know it must be a boson and it’s the heaviest boson ever found,” said Joe Incandela, a spokesperson for the experiment team. “The implications are very significant and it is precisely for this reason that we must be extremely diligent in all of our studies and cross-checks."
“It’s hard not to get excited by these results,” CERN Research Director Sergio Bertolucci said in the press release. “ We stated last year that in 2012 we would either find a new Higgs-like particle or exclude the existence of the Standard Model Higgs. With all the necessary caution, it looks to me that we are at a branching point: the observation of this new particle indicates the path for the future towards a more detailed understanding of what we’re seeing in the data.”
