Higgs hunt: new particle found

A wave of excitement is spreading across the world's media today as scientists at the Large Hadron Collider ( LHC ) announce the latest results in their search for the Higgs boson . So has this elusive particle been found? And why is finding it so important? I asked Alan Barr of Oxford University's Department of Physics, UK physics coordinator for LHC's ATLAS experiment, what the world's highest energy particle accelerator saw, what it means for science, and what life might be like once physicists' Most Wanted has been safely consigned to the particle zoo. OxSciBlog: Why is the search for the Higgs boson important? - Alan Barr: Over the last hundred years, physicists have studied the subatomic world in exquisite detail, and from their findings have constructed a very beautiful mathematical theory of nature. This remarkable achievement can be likened to a machine in which each of the cogs is required to have its place to make the whole work. This Higgs particle is the "cog" responsible for mass - it is the physical manifestation of the field which is theorized to give weight to all of the other fundamental particles. Without that field, the electrons and quarks would be massless, and would zip around at the speed of light. OSB: What do the latest results tell us? - AB: The latest results show a significant excess of a particular type of event - collisions in which the detector has spotted two high-energy particles of light - photons - which have similar total energies.