First Encounters

Abstract

The experimental discovery in 2012 of the Higgs boson—previously the last unconfirmed particle postulated by the Standard Model of particle physics—was greeted with huge relief and lavish celebration among physicists around the globe. An international search party—conducted both at Fermi Lab and at CERN—had repeatedly come up empty-handed over the span of decades, and now finally the elusive particle had been spotted by two enormous detectors within the inner sanctum of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The fear that physicists might have been chasing a phantom all those years proved unfounded. No—the vast army of researchers and technicians had, in fact, been steadily closing in on a most-wanted particle.