See below for the chat box. Join us each Thursday at 3 p.m. EST for a live conversation with leading scientists and expert reporters.
Today's Topic
They're not claiming the discovery yet, but physicists at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland may have finally found the Higgs boson, the missing piece from particle physicists' Standard Model that explains why all other particles have mass. CERN's Large Hadron Collider has been bashing huge numbers of protons together since 2009 and searching through the debris for evidence that a Higgs was created in one of the pile-ups. Researchers reported faint signals last summer, but these evaporated as more data was gathered. This time, they seem more sure. The two LHC detectors involved, CMS and Atlas, are getting similar results with Higgs masses that are close together. Is the search for the Higgs finally over? What are the implications for the Standard Model given a Higgs with this mass? And if the Higgs in the bag, what will particle physicists look for next?
Join us for a live chat about the Higgs boson at 3 p.m. EST on Thursday, 15 December, on this page. You can leave your questions in the comment box below before the chat starts.
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Today's Guests
Robert M. Roser
Rob Roser has served as a particle physicist at the Fermilab National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, since 1997. His research focuses on one of the central mysteries in physics: the origin of electroweak symmetry breaking and the mechanism by which fundamental particles are endowed with mass. Among other efforts, his work has engaged him in the hunt for the Higgs boson. Roser is a spokesperson for the collision detector at the Fermilab experiment, a collaboration of nearly 600 high energy physicists, and has published more than 500 peer-reviewed scholarly articles. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society.
Gordon Kane
Gordon Kane focuses on ways to test, extend, and strengthen the very successful Standard Model of Particle Physics in his research. He has particularly emphasized the supersymmetric extension of the standard model, along with methods for discovering and understanding the Higgs sector.
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