Correction: The original version of this story left out the name of one of the CU researchers involved in the project. Kevin Stenson is also part of the research team that helped discover evidence of the Higgs Boson. The original article also listed Brian Drell as a postdoctoral researcher. Drell is actually a graduate student.

An international team of scientists — including more than a dozen faculty members and students at the University of Colorado — believes that it may have found evidence of the elusive Higgs boson particle, sometimes called the “God particle,” which helps solve the decades-old mystery of why the universe has mass.



Scientists made the announcement on Wednesday morning in Switzerland at the Center for Nuclear Research, home to the world’s most powerful atom smasher. The $10 billion Large Hadron Collider is a 17-mile pipe buried underground on the border of Switzerland and France that allows scientists to slam beams of protons, traveling in opposite directions at velocities near the speed of light, into each other, creating, in essence, a miniature Big Bang.



The results of the tiny-but-powerful collisions are then watched and recorded by one of two main detectors in the collider: ATLAS and the Compact Muon Solenoid, or CMS. University of Colorado researchers helped build the eyes of CMS, which actually record the particles released during the collisions.



Both ATLAS and CMS found evidence of the Higgs boson, scientists said Wednesday.



The discovery fortifies the “standard model” of physics, which was developed in the 1970s to explain how the universe’s tiniest particles — those that make up individual atoms — behave. The theory says that everything in the universe is created from 12 subatomic particles, generally known as quarks and leptons, which are governed by four forces. And while the model has been extremely successful in predicting how subatomic particles interact, it doesn’t explain why those particles have mass.



To answer that quandary, scientists hypothesized that another particle — known as the Higgs boson, after Peter Higgs, who predicted its existence — must interact with particles to give them mass, though the particle had never actually been found by physicists in any type of experiment.



One of the Large Hadron Collider’s principal goals was to find the Higgs boson, and CMS and ATLAS were both designed specifically to be able to detect the particle, though that was no easy task since researchers weren’t exactly sure how big the particle would be.



“The theory didn’t tell us how heavy it would be, so we had to search over a large range for it,” said CU physicist William Ford. “We really did design the Large Hadron Collider to be able to cover that whole range and get some kind of answer, eventually.”



Less than three years after scientist flipped the switch on the atom smasher, an answer appears to be at hand, and CMS and ATLAS have measured a new particle with a mass of about 125 billion electronic volts.



“What we have found is incontrovertible evidence for a new particle at around 125 GeV,” said CU physicist John Cumalat, in a news release. “To prove it is the standard model Higgs particle we will need to carefully measure the new particle’s properties, but with more data these properties can be determined.”



Ford said he was hopeful when he began working on CMS that the collider would find evidence of the Higgs boson.



“I was pretty optimistic, but we couldn’t be sure,” he said. “… What I am rather surprised about is that we go there this soon.”



Other members of the CU team involved in the project include faculty members Uriel Nauenberg, Jim Smith, Kevin Stenson and Steve Wagner; postdoctoral researchers Alessandro Gaz, Eduardo Luiggi, Keith Ulmer, and Shilei Zang; graduate students Brian Drell, Bernadette Heyburn, Andrew Johnson and Troy Mulholland; and technical staff members Eric Erdos and Douglas Johnson.



Peter Higgs was in the audience in Switzerland for Wednesday’s announcement, and he said that the discovery appeared to be close to what he predicted.



“It is an incredible thing that it has happened in my lifetime,” he said, calling the discovery a huge achievement for the proton-smashing collider.



The Associated Press contributed to this report.



Contact Camera Staff Writer Laura Snider at 303-473-1327 or sniderl@dailycamera.com.