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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
Canadians help snag elusive 'God particle'
VANCOUVER -- Canuck brain power is being lauded for helping find a missing link towards explaining life, the universe and everything else as researchers reveal the discovery of the so-called "God particle."
About 150 Canadians are part of an international network whose research helped to discover the new subatomic particle the community believes could very well be the crucial Higgs boson particle, announced this week in Geneva.
"It's a huge Canadian success story," said particle physicist Isabel Trigger, one of the team leaders with the TRIUMF particle and nuclear physics lab based in Vancouver.
"All of these people have spent 20 years of their lives building something which now has found the particle we were looking for... If it's not the Higgs boson, it sure looks like the Higgs boson," Trigger said Thursday.
The particle is one of the smallest units of matter, which experts say is the key to understanding why matter has mass.
Canadians based at TRIUMF built several large pieces of a particle detector named ATLAS -- the giant machine observing the atom smashing experiment that ultimately revealed what could be the elusive building block. The work evolved from construction, through assembly, installation and calibration.
ATLAS, which operates inside the renowned Large Hadron Collider, run by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, generated millions of gigabytes of data each year, which was then distributed amongst about 137 countries for analysis.
Several elated researchers who worked on the project and dozens more excited students congregated at TRIUMF to discuss the findings over colourful schematics and videos depicting the reactions occurring inside the particle detector's belly.
A large whiteboard displayed the master equation describing the Standard Model of Physics, with the previously only theorized Higgs boson portion scrawled in striking blue ink.
Michelle Boudreau, a graduate student at Simon Fraser University, said she was blown away by the big news.
"Being a physicist, you hear about everything being discovered so long ago," she said. "For something completely new to be discovered is awesome -- exciting times."
-- The Canadian Press
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition July 5, 2012 A7
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