The CMS collaboration at CERN has published its first results about the search for the Higgs boson. The paper concludes that CMS found no evidence of the Higgs in their dataset from 2010. The latest result explores a version of the Higgs in a world that has an extra generation of fundamental particles.

A collision inside the CMS detector

Particle physicists theorize that the Higgs boson can explain why particles have mass. Particle accelerators like the Tevatron at Fermilab have been on the hunt for the elusive particle for decades now. The CDF and DZero experiments at Fermilab are quickly closing in on the version of the Higgs that fits within the framework of the Standard Model.

The Standard Model contains three known families or generations of particles. Physicists predict that a fourth family may exist, opening the door to new opportunities to search for the Higgs. The CMS result allows physicists to exclude the Higgs mass range of 144-207 GeV/c2 for physics models that include the proposed fourth family of particles.

“After many years of construction, our detector is ready and the LHC is ready. Now we have finally started our long journey on the search for the Higgs,” said U.S. CMS Collaboration Board Chair Nick Hadley, a physicist at the University of Maryland.

On Feb. 19, the LHC started circulating beam again, and the experiments expect to see the first collisions of 2011 this month. CERN plans to run the LHC until the end of 2012, when the machine will have a yearlong technical stop. The CMS collaboration believes that if the Higgs exists, the 2011-12 physics run should provide enough data to make a discovery.

Read the CMS statement