As a layman I would now say… I think we have it.
“It” was the Higgs boson, the almost-mythical entity that had put particle physics in the global spotlight, and the man proclaiming to be a mere layman was none other than CERN’s Director-General, Rolf Heuer. Heuer spoke in the Laboratory’s main auditorium on 4 July 2012, moments after the CMS and ATLAS collaborations at the Large Hadron Collider announced the discovery of a new elementary particle, which we now know is a Higgs boson. Applause reverberated in Geneva from as far away as Melbourne, Australia, where delegates of the International Conference on High Energy Physics were connected via video-conference.
So what exactly is so special about this particle?
Read the latest feature in the “LHC Physics at 10” series to find out.