inside HPC, Interview with Portland Group’s Michael Wolfe, here. 1.5 million core parallel programs.

Dark Matter, Dark energy, Dark Gravity, Why the Higgs Boson is not Dark Matter, here. 

The Higgs boson is considered a necessary part of the Standard Model of particle physics. In the Standard Model there are 3 main forces of nature: the electromagnetic force, the weak nuclear force, and the strong nuclear force. The Standard Model does not address gravity and we do not yet have a proven theory for the unification of gravity with the other 3 forces.

On July 4th CERN, the European particle physics lab near Geneva, announced that two experiments using the Large Hadron Collider accelerator, ATLAS and CMS, have both amassed strong statistical evidence (around 5 sigma) for a new particle. This new particle has a mass of about 126 GeV* and “smells” very much like it is the long sought after, and elusive, Higgs boson. The prediction of the Higgs dates from 1964. For comparison, the proton mass is about 0.94 GeV, so the Higgs is around 134 times more massive. Further work is necessary to determine all of its properties, but at this point it looks as if the new particle decays into other particles in the expected manner. It is these decay products that are actually detected.

World Science Festival, Hunting the Higgs, here.  First video is the actual announcement… verklempt. 

The world’s most ambitious physics endeavor has delivered: On July 4th, officials from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced that two major experiments using the Large Hadron Collider, an enormous circular particle accelerator buried on the border between France and Switzerland, have found preliminary evidence of the long-sought Higgs boson, a subatomic particle at the center of one of the biggest mysteries in physics: What gives matter mass? “It’s hard not to get excited by these results,” said CERN Research Director Sergio Bertolucci. “We stated last year that in 2012 we would either find a new Higgs-like particle or exclude the existence of the Standard Model Higgs. With all the necessary caution, it looks to me that we are at a branching point: the observation of this new particle indicates the path for the future towards a more detailed understanding of what we’re seeing in the data.” Watch the announcement here, and peruse our collection of videos offering expert insight into the elusive Higgs.

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