On 4 July 2012, the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at the Large Hadron Collider independently announced they had each observed a new particle, in the mass region around 125 GeV, consistent with the long-predicted Higgs boson: no electric charge, short-lived, and decaying in the ways the theory forecast. The Higgs boson appears in roughly one collision in a billion, so the finding rested on combing enormous volumes of collision data for a statistically significant excess rather than seeing any single event directly. By March 2013, further analysis of spin and other properties confirmed the particle was a Higgs boson, completing the last unconfirmed piece of the Standard Model of particle physics and experimentally validating the mechanism Brout, Englert and Higgs had proposed 48 years earlier.
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MethodThe ATLAS and CMS collaborations created high-energy proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider and searched the resulting decay data for a statistically significant excess consistent with a Higgs boson, since the particle cannot be observed directly and must be inferred from what it decays into. 1 Key FindingOn 4 July 2012 the ATLAS and CMS collaborations announced observation of a new particle around 125 GeV; further analysis through March 2013 confirmed it was a Higgs boson. 1 LocationCERN, near Geneva, Switzerland (Large Hadron Collider). 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
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