The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has produced its first pair of Z bosons, based on data released by the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) collaboration, the physicsworld.com website reported.
"Seeing this first pair is an important step in the giant collider's hunt for the Higgs boson because the generation and analysis of many more such events could provide one of the key signatures of the elusive Higgs," the website said.
The Higgs boson, nicknamed the "God particle," was hypothesized in the 1960s to explain how particles acquire mass. Discovering the particle could explain how matter appeared in the split-second after the Big Bang.
CMS is one of two general-purpose experiments at the world's largest atom smasher that have been built to search for new physics. It is designed to detect a wide range of particles and phenomena produced in the LHC's high-energy proton-proton and heavy-ion collisions.
The $5.6 billion international LHC project has involved more than 2,000 physicists from hundreds of universities and laboratories in 34 countries since 1984. Over 700 Russian physicists from 12 research institutes have taken part.
The collider, located 100 meters under the French-Swiss border with a circumference of 27 km, enables scientists to shoot subatomic particles round an accelerator ring at almost the speed of light, channeled by powerful fields produced by superconducting magnets.
MOSCOW, November 12 (RIA Novosti)
