A search that began almost 50 years ago is finally coming to a close. “But this is just the begin­ning,” said North­eastern physics pro­fessor Emanuela Bar­beris.

She and her North­eastern col­leagues Darien Wood and George Alverson have been among thou­sands of physi­cists in search of the Higgs Boson with the DZero exper­i­ment at Fer­milab in Illi­nois and the CMS exper­i­ment at CERN in Switzer­land. Ear­lier this week, physi­cists at CERN announced the most defin­i­tive evi­dence yet.

The so-​​called “God par­ticle” was first the­o­rized in the 1960s as essen­tial to the Stan­dard Model of par­ticle physics. Without it, our fun­da­mental under­standing of the uni­verse would be incor­rect and some other expla­na­tion would be necessary.

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