'God particle' announcement expected
Last updated 18:49 04/07/2012
Scientists are expected to make an announcement on the existence of the so-called "God particle" after video was leaked showing a spokesman from an experiment centre saying a new particle had been observed.
Joe Incandela, a spokesman for the European Organisation for Nuclear Research or CERN, says in the recording: "We have observed a new particle.''
"We have quite strong evidence that there's something,'' Mr Incandela says.
Physicists from the experiment centre are playing down the video, saying it was one of many prepared ahead of the historic announcement today.
At 8pm (NZ time) today, simultaneous announcements will be made in Melbourne and Geneva settling the question of whether the theorised Higgs boson - or "God particle'' - does exist.
Two heads of one of the experiment stations at the Large Hadron Collider, where the experiments are taking place, said videos for all outcomes of the experiment were prepared.
"Two videos, a set, were prepared,'' CMS experiment deputy physics co-ordinator Luca Malgeri said.
"It's an interview, but it is one of many videos.
"You want to be prepared in all occasions.''
Physics co-ordinator of the CMS experiment Greg Landsberg said the past few days had been hectic for scientists working on the experiment as they tried to finalise the results for the seminar.
He said people would have to wait until 6pm to learn if the particle had been found.
Professor Malgeri denied the recording was leaked, saying the video was accidentally made public during the editing process.
There are three possible outcomes to the 30-year search for the Higgs boson, a theoretical particle that is key to the scientific understanding of all matter.
The first is that its existence has been proved.
The second is that the researchers have found something previously unthought of.
The third is they are able to rule out the existence of the Higgs boson all together.
In the leaked recording, Mr Incandela says it will still take some time to ascertain the properties of what had been observed.
"Obviously all of this is extremely preliminary,'' he says.
WHAT IS THE HIGGS BOSON?
The Higgs is the last missing piece of the Standard Model, the theory that describes the basic building blocks of the universe. The other 11 particles predicted by the model have been found and finding the Higgs would validate the model.
Ruling it out or finding something more exotic would force a rethink on how the universe is put together.
Scientists believe that in the first billionth of a second after the Big Bang, the universe was a gigantic soup of particles racing around at the speed of light without any mass to speak of. It was through their interaction with the Higgs field that they gained mass and eventually formed the universe.
The Higgs field is a theoretical and invisible energy field that pervades the whole cosmos. Some particles, like the photons that make up light, are not affected by it and therefore have no mass. Others are not so lucky and find it drags on them as porridge drags on a spoon.
Picture George Clooney (the particle) walking down a street with a gaggle of photographers (the Higgs field) clustered around him. An average guy on the same street (a photon) gets no attention from the paparazzi and gets on with his day. The Higgs particle is the signature of the field _ an eyelash of one of the photographers.
The particle is theoretical, first posited in 1964 by six physicists, including Briton Peter Higgs.
The search for it only began in earnest in the 1980s, first in Fermilab's now mothballed Tevatron particle collider near Chicago and later in a similar machine at CERN, but most intensively since 2010 with the start-up of the European centre's Large Hadron Collider.
- AAP and Reuters
Watch live video update from the link below:
CERN update on its search for Higgs boson starts at 3AM ET (video)