Although some students might camp out overnight to get the best seats at a movie theater, physics junior Stephanie Hamilton was in line for something more monumental when she camped out in front of the main auditorium at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or
CERN, Wednesday at 2 a.m. CET.
Hamilton — who is completing a summer internship at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland — waited along with more than a thousand others to get entry into the auditorium and was one of only about 150 who were there to witness the announcement that scientists had discovered a new particle consistent with that of the Higgs boson.
“At first, the presenters went over basic intro information (detector performance, analysis techniques, etc.), but as soon as they said we were getting to the results, the whole auditorium sat up a little straighter,” Hamilton said in an email. “It was a noticeable movement too. There was a lot of cheering with the first … result, and it only went up from there. I think we stood clapping and cheering for a full five minutes after the announcement was over. It was like a sporting event, but what we physicists get really excited about is physics.”
The subatomic particle’s discovery was confirmed at a 5-sigma deviation, meaning there is about a one in 3.5 million chance the discovery is incorrect. However, the existence of a Higgs boson has major implications for science, as it essentially confirms the Standard Model for particle physics and will help to advance the study of particle physics.
“We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature,” CERN Director General Rolf Heuer said in a press release.
MSU has been involved with the project for years, including a number of students and university staff building a portion of the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC — the instrument used to find the particle.
Physics professor Joey Huston has worked intimately with the project at CERN and helped to construct part of the LHC’s trigger and the Hadron calorimeter. Huston said construction of the Hadron calorimeter — which filtered out the more interesting particle collisions in the LHC for analysis — began in 1998 at MSU and was shipped to CERN in 2003.
Huston said when he returns home to East Lansing from CERN, he will have a wealth of knowledge to share with his students, especially those who will be taking introductory-level classes.
“I use this as an opportunity to teach them about the excitement of science,” Huston said. “Even though (my students) may not be going into any of these kinds of sciences, they can understand that this has a greater meaning of something that will impact them in the future.”
“A hundred years from now, 2012 is going to be remembered as the year the Higgs boson was discovered.”
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