Scientists made an announcement regarding evidence for the “Higgs boson” at CERN in Switzerland in the early hours of December 14, Australian time.

Below is a comment from an Australian scientist, and comments from Canadian and UK experts, thanks to the UK and Canadian science media centres.

The Canadian SMC has also prepared a useful backgrounder.

CERN has a press release, photos, footage and good background info.

We have a list of experts in Australia who are able to respond, compliments of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Particle Physics at the Terascale (see their press release).

Feel free to use these quotes in your stories.  Any further comments will be posted here. If you would like to speak to an expert, please don’t hesitate to contact us on (08) 7120 8666 or by email.

 ———-

Associate Professor Kevin Varvell is from the School of Physics at the University of Sydney, and the Director of the Sydney node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Particle Physics at the Terascale 

“The results announced last night have the scientific community anticipating that the long search for the Higgs boson may soon bear fruit – by either seeing it emerge with more data in 2012 or by closing the window on its existence as predicted by our current standard theory. A big further step will have been taken towards a deeper understanding of the workings of the Universe at a fundamental level.”

———-

Dr. Philip Schuster, Faculty, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Canada

“For 40 years, physicists have searched for the origin of the weak interactions, and the mechanism that generates mass for fundamental particles in the Universe. These phenomena are responsible for basic features of our world ranging from the long lifetime of the Sun to the very existence of atoms. Today, it looks like we have promising evidence that there is actually a Higgs mechanism in Nature, and the particle associated with that mechanism may finally be showing itself. Going forward, physicists will gather more evidence needed to prove that a Higgs particle exists. Understanding the properties of the Higgs mechanism and where it comes from will be an important goal for the next decade.”

 ———-

Dr Alan Barr of Oxford University’s Department of Physics, ATLAS UK physics coordinator, said:

“Our understanding of physics at the microscopic level is described by a beautiful piece of mathematics known as the “Standard Model”. For that mathematical model to work correctly, various pieces must work together, like a well-engineered machine. The Higgs boson is a crucial part of the machinery of the subatomic world.

“This evidence of the existence of a Higgs boson suggests that the mathematically beautiful theory of the subatomic world is more than just an elegant model, and that it really does seem to describe the universe around us.”

“It is a testament to the superb performance of the LHC that we are already finding hints that might be indicative of Higgs bosons so early in the machine’s lifetime. The results are not yet conclusive, but during the next year we will know whether the Higgs boson exists in the form predicted by the “Standard Model” of particle physics. The analysis has to be done very carefully, since in scientific research the most interesting results are often found in unexpected places.’

“We must bear in mind that the Standard Model is known to be incomplete, since it describes only that 5% of the universe that is made of atoms. What the LHC will tell us about the other 95% of the universe is likely to be an open question for many years to come.”

 ———- 

Prof Dan Tovey, Professor of Particle Physics at the University of Sheffield and spokesman for ATLAS, said:

“While these results do not provide conclusive proof of the existence of the Higgs boson the fact that broadly similar hints have been seen by two competing experiments using several different complementary techniques is very suggestive. With much more data due next year it won’t be long before we can answer this question once and for all.”

———-

Prof Geoff Hall, Professor of Physics at Imperial College London and UK spokesperson for CMS said:

“At the beginning of this year, we had little idea of what mass the Higgs boson might have, assuming it really existed. Now the situation is completely changed, as a result of less than one year of LHC data, and the region where the Higgs may be found has been narrowed from about 500 GeV to 10-20 GeV. There are also strong hints that the Higgs may really exist in that narrow range. This is quite remarkable. The successful and rapid analysis shows how well the experiments work and how ready for the complex studies the scientists are, after about twenty years of building and preparation. It has been a huge effort. It is too soon to draw conclusions but it certainly begins to feel as though we are on the verge of momentous progress, confirming the Standard Model and shedding new light on deeper ideas. Of course, it is tempting to speculate how particle physics will change with a Higgs discovery but most of us are still focused on verifying that it is really found and, if so, to prove what kind of Higgs it is – eg Standard Model or supersymmetric. This will require a lot more data in the coming year, and even after that for some years to come.”

 ———-

Prof Themis Bowcock, Head OF Particle Physics at the University of Liverpool, said:

“The CERN results on the Higgs boson have the scientific world agog. Have they or have they not seen the elusive particle sometimes called the God Particle? First proposed in the 1960s, this particle plays a crucial role in the evolution of the Universe from the Big Bang to the way we see it today.

 ”Our understanding of nature and its fundamental forces is known as the Standard Model. For the last 40 years it has allowed us to understand phenomena such as light, the way the sun burns, and how atoms and nuclei are held together.

 ”The Standard Model relies on a particle called the Higgs boson which interacts with other particles making some very heavy whilst leaving others light. This shapes the Universe we know today. However to date no-one has found direct evidence of the Higgs.

 ”The ATLAS and CMS experiments at the LHC have come as close as anyone to observing the Higgs and now both have presented small but significant signals.  It is possible that each observation is simply a statistical fluke, a fluctuation in the background, mimicking a Higgs signal. But the fact that ATLAS and CMS independently agree on the possible Higgs mass substantially increases the overall significance of the results.

 ”If the Higgs observation is confirmed, through analysis of data to be collected next year, this really will be one of the discoveries of the century. Physicists will have uncovered a keystone in the makeup of the Universe – one whose influence we see and feel every day of our lives.”

———-

Dr Stephen Haywood, Head of the Atlas Group at the STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, said:

“This is what many of us have been working towards for the best part of 20 years.  If the first inklings of the Higgs boson are confirmed, then this is just the start of the adventure to unlock the secrets of the fundamental constituents of the Universe.”

———- 

Dr Claire Shepherd-Themistocleus, Head of the CMS Group at the STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, said:

“We are homing in on the Higgs.  We have had hints today of what its mass might be and the excitement of scientists is palpable.  Whether this is ultimately confirmed or we finally rule out a low mass Higgs boson, we are on the verge of a major change in our understanding of the fundamental nature of matter.”

———- 

Prof Stephan Söldner-Rembold, Head of the Particle Physics Group at the University of Manchester said:

“ATLAS and CMS have presented an important milestone in their search for the Higgs particle, but it is not yet sufficient for a proper discovery given the amount of data recorded so far. Still, I am very excited about it, since the quality of the LHC results is exceptional.

“The Higgs particle seems to have picked itself a mass which makes things very difficult for us physicists. Everything points at a mass in the range 115-140 GeV and we concentrate on this region with our searches at the LHC and at the Tevatron. 

“The results indicate we are about half-way there and within one year we will probably know whether the Higgs particle exists with absolute certainty, but it is unfortunately not a Christmas present this year. The Higgs particle will, of course, be a great discovery, but it would be an even greater discovery if it didn’t exist where theory predicts it to be. This would be a huge surprise and secretly we hope this might happen. If this is case, there must be something else that takes the role of the “standard” Higgs particle, perhaps a family of several Higgs particles or something even more exotic. The unexpected is always the most exciting.”

———-

Beams of protons will be fired around the LHC and will be made to collide at four different locations, corresponding to the positions of different particle detectors. There are 6 detectors in total but the two largest general-purpose detectors, named ATLAS and CMS, will have the main task of analysing the myriad of particles produced by the collisions in the accelerator.

The University of Sydney and University of Melbourne scientists have contributed to the development of the ATLAS detector in the LHC. Australia has invested approximately $2.5 million in the project which is a collaboration of over 40 participating countries.

The first attempt to circulate a beam in the LHC took place at 5:30pm AEST on 10 September 2008.

Feel free to use the quotes below in your stories. If you would like to speak to an expert, please don’t hesitate to contact us on (08) 8207 7415 or by email.

Media resources also available below.

Read comments from:

Professor Geoffrey Taylor is from the School of Physics at The University of Melbourne. He is leading the University of Melbourne team involved in the LHC.

Dr Bruce Yabsley is a particle physicist from the High Energy Physics Department at the University of Sydney.

Dr Aldo Saavedra is a Research Fellow in the High Energy Physics Department at the University of Sydney, Australia. He is working on the ATLAS experiment within the LHC.

Dr Cathy Foley is President of the Australian Institute of Physics.

Dr Elisabetta Barberio is from the School of Physics at the University of Melbourne.

Dr Roger Rassool is from the School of Physics at the University of Melbourne

Dr Phil Dooley, Science Communicator at the School of Physics, University of Sydney

Anthony Waugh is a PhD student in the High Energy Physics Department at the University of Sydney, Australia

Dr Kevin Varvell and Dr Bruce Yabsley are from the High Energy Physics Group at the University of Sydney:

Professor Geoffrey Taylor is from the School of Physics at The University of Melbourne. He is leading the University of Melbourne team involved in the LHC.

“After two decades of development, design, test, and more development, physicists from the Universities of Melbourne and Sydney are eagerly awaiting the start-up of the LHC. With the need to produce particle detectors capable of withstanding the thousand times higher particle intensities of the LHC, and with electronics capable of performing in such an environment, the challenge was enormous. As with all aspects of the ATLAS detector (one of the two major experiments installed in the LHC), collaboration was the key.

The Australians worked alongside colleagues from Europe, Russia, Japan and the USA on the precision silicon tracker detector, now placed at the heart of ATLAS. The Australian team also had important Australian industrial support.

Perth company VEEM engineering produced 35 tons of machined copper alloy disks to shield sensitive parts of the ATLAS detector from the intense particle beams. Startronics (Victoria) produced custom electronics to feed the power needs of the silicon tracker.

The Australians are now looking forward to the start of what is expected to be the dawn of a new era in fundamental physics. Massive computer capability is at the ready, both locally and internationally, via the Grid, for the physicists to make sense of the data that ATLAS will soon produce. What they will find is still unknown. What is known is that major gaps in our knowledge of the universe will be filled by this incredible endeavour.”

Dr Bruce Yabsley is a particle physicist from the High Energy Physics Department at the University of Sydney.

On the disaster scenarios:

“Because the LHC is new, and the highest-energy collider we’ve ever built, some people have raised safety concerns about it. But in fact the proton-beam collisions in ATLAS and the other detectors are at low energies in the wider scheme of things. Cosmic rays hitting earth’s atmosphere, or the moon, can reach much higher energies; and even those energies are dwarfed by cosmic rays collisions in space. And all of these things have been going on for billions of years. We can’t compete with nature on energy, and we’re not trying to: the point of the LHC is to access some of these interactions in the lab — inside these big and precisely instrumented detectors — where we can study them properly.”

Dr Aldo Saavedra is a Research Fellow in the High Energy Physics Department at the University of Sydney, Australia. He is working on the ATLAS experiment within the LHC.

On Australian involvement in the early years:

“There was a large R&D effort directed at creating the components of the ATLAS detector in the early stages of the experiment. Australia, through Sydney and Melbourne University, was involved testing and developing the units that measure the position of charged particles as they travel through it, called strip detectors. Hundreds of them are mounted in layers around the collision to recreate the path of the charged particles created”.

On the current contribution:

“Now that the detector is built the focus has been contributing to the software that analyses the data from ATLAS.

It has been said that if all the data from ATLAS was recorded, it would fill 100,000 CDs per second. In reality this is cut down to 27 CDs-worth per minute to keep it reasonable by the ATLAS trigger. One of our current projects is to decrease the amount of data saved by increasing the efficiency of capturing the interesting information. The information that may contain a new discovery.

There are lots of ways to trigger the detector to save the data. In Sydney our interest is triggering with the tau lepton which is a heavy cousin of the electron, being heavy has two advantages: It produces a striking signature in the detector and the particles we want to discover should decay into them.”

On what it means for Australian students:

“There are lots of scope for students to make their mark in the experiment. They get the chance to work with scientists in the experiment at CERN and meet students from all over the world. Here in Sydney Jason Lee and Anthony Waugh work on reconstructing and identifying the different particles that were recorded by ATLAS and finding ways to more efficiently model the detector in order to understand how it will respond.”

On how it feels:

“It is an exciting time because this new accelerator is providing us a window to a new regime of matter never studied before. It is uncharted territory and after a lot of work finally the voyage is about to begin. We live in interesting times, it is not every day that you are able to be involved on something new and have the chance to peek at Mother Nature’s book.”

Dr Cathy Foley is President of the Australian Institute of Physics.

“Australian physicists have been involved from the beginning, a team lead by Geoff Taylor from the University of Melbourne and Kevin Varvell from the University of Sydney have contributed to ATLAS – one of six machines at the LHC that will attempt to detect the strange particles created. They have designed detectors and shielding, developed software to model the behaviour of the detector, and software that triggers the collection of information.

The discoveries that will be made at the LHC will rewrite our understanding of how the universe began and the way it operates at the most fundamental level.

Scientists think the kinds of collisions that the LHC will be generating happen all the time in nature. Each collision of a pair of protons in the LHC will release an amount of energy comparable to that of two colliding mosquitoes, it’s like a rice-bubble pop.”

Dr Elisabetta Barberio is from the School of Physics at the University of Melbourne.

“It is important that students engage in the science of such blue-sky research – we need physicists to make sense of all the data the LHC will generate! The output of the LHC experiment is considerable – equivalent to 100,000 DVDs of data will be produced each year. We have to think of new ways of being able to store and access, and analyse the secrets held within the data, which means developing new technologies like grid computing.”

Dr Roger Rassool is from the School of Physics at the University of Melbourne

“This is a really special time in the physics community – for this generation of students, it is the 1960s equivalent of man’s moon walk. For students, it will be a once-in-a-lifetime event and will inspire a generation for years to come. These experiments go to the heart of really big questions like ‘what is the universe really made of?’ and ‘why do we exist?’. It’s exciting stuff!”

Dr Phil Dooley, Science Communicator at the School of Physics, University of Sydney

“No, the world won’t end as LHC turns on. Instead a new world of discoveries will open up as we explore further and further into inner space. The things we are trying to see are way smaller than any microscope can see, instead we play a grown-up version of smash-up derby, winding protons (sub-atomic particles that we are all made of) up to extraordinary speeds and smashing them together to see what happens. This is a realm made possible by the Theory of Relativity and E=MC2; Einstein would be proud of us.

The energies the LHC will be able to create are greater than any experiment we’ve ever done before – closer to the big bang than we’ve ever witnessed. However the particles are very small, so it’s not really a big bang – more a nano-bang – an incredible amount of energy but in a tiny tiny area. So even in the extremely unlikely event that a black hole is created it would be so small that it would be almost impossible to detect, and not at all dangerous!

But there will be particles that have never before been seen, which will revolutionise our understanding of the universe – and what we are made of. There is no doubt that twenty years hence this will have been one of the most significant experiments ever and it’s great that Australian physicists, from The University of Sydney and The University of Melbourne are a key part of this quest.

Even before any data has come out, the experiment has already been a revolution in its creation; coordinating a team of thousands of physicists, engineers and technicians from 80 countries working on the one project, in the process creating the world’s largest fridge, and getting it colder than deep space; and creating a network of supercomputers able to digest the vast amounts of data that this experiment will spit out are already triumphs and a tribute to the extraordinary resources of our human race.”

Anthony Waugh is a PhD student in the High Energy Physics Department at the University of Sydney, Australia

On what it means for a student to work on ATLAS:

“The ATLAS experiment on the LHC is a great project to work on. The opportunity to collaborate with some of the leading physicists in the world, on the largest experiment in the world is very exciting. The biggest thing is knowing that although the Australian group is small in numbers, our contribution has been and will continue to be, extremely important and genuinely valued by the ATLAS community.”

Dr Kevin Varvell and Dr Bruce Yabsley are from the High Energy Physics Group at the University of Sydney:

“‘The ‘point’ of the Large Hadron Collider is to find out new things about matter at the smallest scale: the fundamental ‘building blocks’, and how they interact with each other. Current theory explains this very well indeed, at the energies we can reach in existing particle accelerators.

But at LHC energies we expect to see something new. The simplest new thing would be a particle called the Higgs boson, which is the one part of our current theory we haven’t seen yet. However other alternatives are possible. We may see a bunch of particles like the Higgs, but with different behaviour; if the theoretical model called ‘supersymmetry’ is correct, we’ll see lots of new types of particles, maybe including the still-unknown ‘dark matter’ that contributes 85% of the stuff in galaxies.

If some recent suggestions about gravity are true, we may even see miniature black holes: tiny tiny ones, smaller than a proton and evaporating in an instant. But at the moment all of this is speculation.

Once we’ve sorted through the data from the LHC and understood it, we’ll know which of these ideas correspond to reality, and which don’t. The correct answers may be things we haven’t thought of yet … it’s a very exciting time to be working in particle physics.”

MEDIA RESOURCES:

The CERN website has images and video that the press can use, which can be found on their resources page

This LHC document of frequently asked questions (pdf) could also be helpful

In order to download the highest quality video files (which can be very large), you need to register a free account (seems to take a few hours to process):

Some video files can be found by clicking here

To download the highest quality video:

1 – Go to http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/988779
2 – click ‘Download Movie’ under the movie window
3 – next to ‘Download high-res version’ you may have the option of avi or mov, so choose your selected file format.
4 – if you have registered an account, you will be asked to enter your email address and password.
5 – fill out the brief form (stating your media outlet etc.) and submit it.
6 – your download should now start!

Feel free to use these quotes in your stories or if you would like to interview these or additional experts, call the Australian Science Media Centre on (08) 8207 7415 or email us.

Background (compiled by the UK Science Media Centre)

Click here for the Nobel press release

What is Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation?
The Cosmic Microwave Background is the remnant radiation left over from the Big Bang. Its detection (accidentally) by Penzias and Wilson in 1965 (I think) was probably the final piece of evidence that blew away the ideas of a steady state Universe and confirmed the Big Bang theory of the expanding Universe.

The radiation is the signature of the “fireball” emerging soon after the Big Bang at the point in time where the matter in the Universe became transparent and the radiation was able to spread out into the Universe. It has cooled to its current low temperature pf 3K due to the expansion of the Universe since.

One of the key problems in Cosmology has been understanding why the Universe is clumpy, with islands of matter in the form of stars and galaxies. Something must have caused this and the signature of the initial trigger was predicted to be seen as fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background. The NASA Satellite COBE, led by George Smoot, provided the first detection of these fluctuations and published the results in 1992. This was the first science result to make it onto the front page of the New York Times (and many other papers).

John C. Mather was Primary Investigator on the Far-InfraRed Absolute Spectrophotometer instrument on COBE. Smoot did the Differential Microwave Radiometers, which measured the fluctuations. Mather’s instrument measured the blackbody temperature.

David Jamieson is Professor of Physics at the University of Melbourne and President of the Australian Institute of Physics.

“This experiment was visionary because it helped move the field of cosmology from mysticism into the realm of research science.

It was really one of the pioneering experiments that set us on the path to answering the big questions of the universe: How did it begin? How did it evolve? Where is it heading in the future?

The Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) experiments gave us the first images of the ripples created by the Big Bang that gave rise to galaxies and eventually our own solar system.”

Professor Karl Glazebrook, Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne specialising in the study of Observational Cosmology and Galaxy Evolution. He is currently working on trying to solve the problem of why the expansion of the Universe is accelerating at the present day using observations of galaxies which trace the primordial fluctuations in the Big Bang.

“This is probably the most significant result in cosmology since the discovery of the Big Bang itself and I am very pleased and excited to see the Nobel being awarded for this.

Ever since the microwave remnant radiation from the Big Bang was first detected in 1963 by Penzias and Wilson (who also got a Nobel) cosmologists had been searching for fluctuations in this radiation due to tiny irregularities in the Big Bang. This was a fundamental prediction of our whole world view – tiny fluctuations in the Big Bang grew under gravity in to galaxies, stars, planets and ultimately us. It was not until 1992 that these were first detected by NASA’s COBE satellite because these fluctuations are only 1 part in 100,000.

It was a magnificent achievement. COBE also showed the Big Bang was a “perfect blackbody” – this means that the energy of the light emitted from the Big Bang follows accurately that of a theoretically perfect hot object, another key prediction of the standard model.

Professor Rachel Webster leads the astrophysics group at the University of Melbourne, and is an active member of the Australia Astronomical community.  She is also on the Visiting Committee for the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is responsible for the James Webb Telescope.  John Mather is the chief scientist of the James Webb Telescope.

“The very high precision measurement of the temperature and shape of the cosmic mcirowave background by the COBE satellite was the key observation which cemented our ideas on the Big Bang model of the universe.  In addition, COBE detected very small variations or fluctuations in the temperature on small scales.  These were only about one part  in a million, and so required clever techniques to establish  that they were real.  These small regions are a little bit more  dense than the average, and would eventually collapse to form the galaxies we see today.”