"The atmosphere at CERN was electric," said Penn physicist Brig Williams, who flew to Europe to hear the results firsthand and to represent his team.
Over the next year, Williams said, the team expects to be able to definitively find the Higgs, if these hints are not a statistical fluke. But Tuesday may be the day they remember.
"If this is the Higgs," said Penn physicist Mark Trodden, "we will probably look back at this as when we saw the first honest hint."
The 27 Penn scientists involved with the project already knew half the story, because they had been looking through one of two windows into the world exposed by the collider. That window, named Atlas, is a doughnut-shaped detector, 80 feet in diameter, designed to detect exotic particles like the Higgs. Another team is using a similarly large detector called CMS. Neither team had been privy to the results of the other, but that changed Tuesday.
The Penn team was relieved to learn that the other team, operating the CMS detector, did not present stronger and more statistically significant evidence for a Higgs particle. This represents the first particle to be found in more than 16 years, and no one wants to be on the second team to find it.
The collider works by accelerating beams of protons, which are components of the atomic nucleus, to near the speed of light and steering them into head-on collisions.
Those collisions, which happen by the millions per second, produce concentrations of energy unlike anything that has existed since the origin of the universe.
The energy can spontaneously condense into exotic bits of matter through the relationship defined by the famous Einstein equation E=mc2. Since no one has ever concentrated this much energy before, the physicists hoped to see not only the Higgs particle but some surprises, too.
