Tea and World Domination

February 23rd, 2012 at 6:59PM

rhamphotheca:

Physicists Pinpoint Elementary Particle, Leading Way to Higgs Boson
by Nathalie Wolchover
Physicists at Fermilab in Chicago have improved the measurement of a subatomic particle called the W boson. Their result won’t just help physicists better understand exotic particles; it also narrows the range of possible energies of W’s flashier cousin the Higgs boson, dubbed the “God particle” in the media.
To obtain their new-and-improved value for the W boson mass, physicists working on the CDF (Collider Detector at Fermilab) experiment analyzed data from hundreds of trillions of particle collisions inside the Tevatron, a particle accelerator at Fermilab. The Tevatron no longer plays pingpong with particles — it shut down for good last fall — but this trove of data was gathered in the four years before its retirement.
The CDF team announced the new results at a seminar this morning (Feb. 23). As it turns out, the W boson has an energy (also equivalent to mass) of 80.387 billion electron-volts, or giga-electron volts (GeV), plus or minus 19 million electron-volts…
(read more: Live Science) (image: Michael Taylor | Shutterstock)

Physicists Pinpoint Elementary Particle, Leading Way to Higgs Boson

by Nathalie Wolchover

Physicists at Fermilab in Chicago have improved the measurement of a subatomic particle called the W boson. Their result won’t just help physicists better understand exotic particles; it also narrows the range of possible energies of W’s flashier cousin the Higgs boson, dubbed the “God particle” in the media.

To obtain their new-and-improved value for the W boson mass, physicists working on the CDF (Collider Detector at Fermilab) experiment analyzed data from hundreds of trillions of particle collisions inside the Tevatron, a particle accelerator at Fermilab. The Tevatron no longer plays pingpong with particles — it shut down for good last fall — but this trove of data was gathered in the four years before its retirement.

The CDF team announced the new results at a seminar this morning (Feb. 23). As it turns out, the W boson has an energy (also equivalent to mass) of 80.387 billion electron-volts, or giga-electron volts (GeV), plus or minus 19 million electron-volts…

(read more: Live Science) (image: Michael Taylor | Shutterstock)