The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World (46 page)

Joe Incandela, spokesperson for CMS in 2012.

© CERN

A candidate Higgs event at the ATLAS detector. The two long blue lines are muons, and the short blue lines are electrons, so this could represent the decay of the Higgs into two Z bosons.

© CERN

The ATLAS detector under construction. Note the person standing at the middle bottom. The eight giant tubes are magnets used to deflect muons in order to measure their energies.

© CERN

The CMS detector under construction.

© CERN

Yoichiro Nambu, pioneer of symmetry breaking, gluons, and string theory.

CREATIVE COMMONS/BESTYTHEDEVINE

Philip Anderson, leader in condensed-matter physics and thoughtful curmudgeon.

CREATIVE COMMONS/PHILIP WARREN

Left to right: Tom Kibble, Gerald Guralnik, Carl Richard Hagen, François Englert, and Robert Brout, at the 2010 Sakurai Prize ceremony. Peter Higgs shared the award but was absent.

Peter Higgs, visiting the ATLAS experiment.

© CERN

Left to right: Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam, and Steven Weinberg, at the 1979 Nobel Prize ceremony.

© BETTMANN/CORBIS

The data produced and analyzed in the LHC’s search for the Higgs. These plots show the number of events that produce two high-energy photons, where the total energy of the photons ranges from 100 to 160 GeV, in the 2011–2012 data from ATLAS and CMS. The dotted lines shows the prediction without any Higgs boson; the solid curve includes a Higgs with a mass of 126.5 GeV (ATLAS) or 125.3 GeV (CMS).

© CERN

© CERN

Why we do science.

ZACH WEINERSMITH, SATURDAY MORNING BREAKFAST CEREAL