Physics Letters B, Elsevier’s flagship journal in high energy physics, announced today that the observations of the long-sought Higgs particle, hailed as one of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time, have been published. The papers: “ Observation of a new boson at a mass of 125 GeV with the CMS experiment at the LHC” and “ Observation of a new particle in the search for the Standard Model Higgs boson with the ATLAS detector at the LHC” are freely available online on ScienceDirect.
In July 2012, The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva announced they had captured a new particle that may be the elusive Higgs boson in two gigantic experiments, ATLAS and CMS, both of which independently confirmed the particle’s existence. A world-wide collaboration of more than 5,000 researchers contributed to the discovery.
“These papers present the first observations of a new particle discovered by two big experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in the search for the Standard Model Higgs boson which has spanned many decades and has involved many experiments,” explains physicist Joe Incandela, spokesperson of the CMS experiment. “They are the most important papers to come from the LHC so far and the findings are key to the field of particle physics. We are very pleased to see them published in Physics Letters B, accessible to all who may want to read them.”
“The discovery reported in these papers is a momentous step forward in fundamental knowledge,” added ATLAS experiment spokesperson Fabiola Gianotti. “It is the culmination of more than 20 years of effort of the worldwide high-energy physics community to build and operate instruments of unprecedented technology, complexity, and performance: the LHC accelerator and related experiments.”
The existence of the Higgs particle was first predicted in 1964 by three groups of leading physicists independently — François Englert and Robert Brout in August, Peter Higgs in October, and Gerald Guralnik, C. R. Hagen, and Tom Kibble (GHK) in November. Its discovery completes the Standard Model of particle physics and, most importantly, validates the theories developed over the last 50 years explaining how elementary particles can have mass.
“Elsevier has been working in close relationship with CERN in many ways, from publishing in Open Access LHC results, to SCOAP3, to improve our support for the CERN analysis framework ROOT files with scientific articles,” said Eleonora Presani, publisher of Physics Letters B at Elsevier. “We are proud that this relationship has been strengthened by their decision to publish in Physics Letter B two of the most important articles in their field in the last decade.”
From the outset, Physics Letters B has played an important role in publishing some of the milestone papers in the hunt for the Higgs boson — from Professor Higgs’ letter nearly half a century ago, “ Broken symmetries, massless particles and gauge fields”, to more recent experiments that narrowed the search for the Higgs particle. For example, ” Combined results of searches for the standard model Higgs boson in pp collisions at sqrt(s)=7 TeV” and “ Combined search for the Standard Model Higgs boson using up to 4.9 fb−1 of pp collision data at sqrt(s)=7 TeV with the ATLAS detector at the LHC” .
