IT Infrastructure: Higgs Boson, LHC and Other Wonders of CERN

With the July 4 announcement by a team of physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) that a new particle in the mass region around 125-126 GeV (gigaelectronvolt, a unit of energy equal to a billion electron volts), which could be the long-sought-after Higgs particle, commonly referred to as the "God Particle" was found, the world's attention has been focused on the organization, which is located on the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland. CERN, which operates the world's largest particle physics laboratory (the term is also used to refer to the lab), is home to the world's largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) and the ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS)—a particle physics experiment that is part of the LHC—which were all used to discover the new particle. By the end of 2012, CMS researchers expect to more than triple their total data sample, and to probe further the nature of this new particle. To mark the latest news on the Higgs Boson particle and the search for this elusive yet critical component of the universe, eWEEK takes a look at the latest research coming from CERN and what it means for the future of physics and scientific discovery.