Cern confirms Higgs boson discovery

Question remain on specific nature of new particle

Physics lab Cern has confirmed that the particle discovered last year is a Higgs boson, a vital step in its efforts to increase our understanding of the universe.

The preliminary results uncovered last July appeared to strongly suggest a Higgs had been discovered but after more thorough interrogation of the data the organisation had now confirmed it is a Higgs, although which type is still being assessed.

"The preliminary results with the full 2012 data set are magnificent and to me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson though we still have a long way to go to know what kind of Higgs boson it is." said Joe Incandela, a spokesman for the CMS group at Cern.

CMS is one of the four detectors used by Cern to gather data on the collisions,

Dave Charlton, a spokesman for one of the other detectors, Atlas, welcomed the findings as a major breakthrough in Cern's work.

"The beautiful new results represent a huge effort by many dedicated people. They point to the new particle having the spin-parity of a Higgs boson as in the Standard Model. We are now well started on the measurement programme in the Higgs sector," he said.

The next step for Cern is to fully establish the nature of the particle discovered, and this will require more data from collisions generated by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This is currently under repair for around 15 months so it can handle high energy collisions in the future.

This will allow collisions at seven teraelectronvolts (TeV), twice the rate as previously possible,from the 3.5 Tev the organisation was originally running at, before it bumped up slightly to four TeV in early 2012.

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