In an unprecedented gesture in the history of particle physics, Sergio Bertolucci, Director of Research, announced this morning that CERN is going to do something unusual: give away fundamental particles.

“Given the interest manifested over the past years by the general public for the Higgs boson search, we felt that we had to give some back as a token of appreciation”, said Dr Bertolucci. “As CERN, we have always believed in sharing the results of our research, and the time has come to make that tangible. This is our way of saying thanks for the incredible level of enthusiasm that has greeted this discovery”. The new particle’s discovery was announced at a special seminar on 4 July last year.

Both the ATLAS and CMS experiments have generously accepted to donate some of their precious Higgs bosons. Particles such as Higgs bosons are created from the energy released in proton-proton collisions in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). However, Higgs bosons are extremely rare, being created only once out of one million million such collisions.

“We hope the lucky few who will receive a Higgs boson will cherish them as much as we do”, said Dr Bertolucci.

Each boson will come with a complete set of instructions on how to properly care for it. To enter this lottery, please send an e-mail to Higgs.lottery@cern.ch. A Higgs boson will be sent to the ten lucky winners chosen randomly from all requests received within 24 hours of publishing this post.

Pauline Gagnon

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