Outside, the night was clear and quiet, but in just a few hours the laboratory would be abuzz with crowds and excitement. A few enterprising students were asleep by the entrance, keen to get one of the handful of available seats for the seminar that was to begin at 9.00 a.m. I had just spent the last few hours helping to put the finishing touches on an important article (one that was ultimately translated into 20 languages) that would soon appear on the website of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, one of the two general-purpose particle detectors at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).Īs I rushed to the tram stop, I noticed the queue that had begun to form outside CERN’s main auditorium. It was around a quarter past midnight on 4 July 2012, and I was sprinting to catch the last tram of the night home from CERN, the particle-physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. Webinars Tune into online presentations that allow expert speakers to explain novel tools and applicationsĪchintya Rao recollects the momentous day 10 years ago when CERN announced it had discovered the Higgs boson The big day Fabiola Gianotti (foreground, wearing red top) leads the applause in the packed CERN auditorium on 4 July 2012.Video Watch our specially filmed videos to get a different slant on the latest science.
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