particle physics

The 'father' of the Higgs boson, British physicist Peter Higgs, died on Monday at the age of 94 at his home in Edinburgh (UK), according to a statement released today by the University of Edinburgh. Higgs was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013, along with François Englert, for having predicted in 1964 the existence of a new particle, the so-called Higgs boson. This particle was confirmed almost half a century later by experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider.

The IceCube neutrino observatory, built deep under Antarctic ice, has detected the emission of high-energy neutrinos from within the Milky Way. According to the research, published in the journal Science, this is the first time scientists have obtained solid evidence for the emission of these particles within our galaxy, as they had previously identified high-energy neutrino emission from extragalactic sources.

For the first time, the IceCube collaboration team has found evidence for high-energy neutrino emission from NGC 1068, an active galaxy 47 million light-years away with a supermassive black hole. The finding, made with the detector located under the Antarctic ice sheet, is published in the journal Science.

The IceCube collaboration, with its detector located under the Antarctic ice sheet, has used astrophysical neutrinos to search for changes in the structure of space-time. In the research, published in Nature Physics, the team analysed more than seven years of data and found no signs of a modified structure of space-time imprinted in the characteristics of these particles, a further step towards understanding quantum gravity. 
 

This week we celebrate not only the tenth anniversary of the discovery of the Higgs, but also Run 3: the Large Hadron Collider is back on line to collect a huge amount of data that opens the door to the discovery of new phenomena that could solve unsolved mysteries, such as understanding what makes up the dark matter that makes up 25% of the universe.

On 4 July 2012, physicists from all over the world celebrated the milestone achieved by CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva: they had found the elusive Higgs boson, described theoretically in 1964 and a key part of the standard model. Among the dozens of scientists who participated in that discovery, with the ATLAS and CMS experiments, there were many Spanish physicists, who ten years later appreciate what it meant.