Particle physics is at a turning point

摘要

Let's tentatively agree that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) detectors ATLAS and the Compact Muon Solenoid have discovered a Higgs boson, with a mass of about 125 gigaelectronvolts (GeV). Although standard statistical measures might not consider the situation settled, it seems very likely that there has indeed been a discovery at CERN, Europe's high-energy physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland, given that two quite different detectors both see a signal of some significance at about the same mass, and that both see the expected signals in two or more channels.