Schoolkids visit CERN

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkTFWX0SYIM

Talent 2030 teamed up with the University of Warwick and the National HE Stem Programme to send twenty budding physicists on a trip to see the CERN Laboratory, which has just discovered the Higgs Boson.

It was announced earlier this month that CERN experiments observed a particle consistent with the long-sought Higgs boson as it’s the heaviest boson ever found.”

“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,” said CERN Research Director Sergio Bertolucci. “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.”

A more complete picture of today’s observations will emerge later this year after the Large Hadron Collider provides the experiments with more data.

The next step will be to determine the precise nature of the particle and its significance for our understanding of the universe. It remains to be seen if its properties match those expected for the long-sought Higgs boson, the final missing ingredient in the Standard Model of particle physics, or something more exotic.

All the matter that we can see, however, appears to be no more than about 4% of the total. A more exotic version of the Higgs particle could be a bridge to understanding the 96% of the universe that remains obscure.