Now, as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – the monster proton smasher at the European particle laboratory, Cern – gears up to start its third period of data collection on Tuesday, experts are hoping to unpick further secrets of the fundamental building blocks of the universe.
Bortoletto, now head of particle physics at the University of Oxford and part of the team that discovered the Higgs boson, said her main memory of the events a decade ago was the moment two weeks before the announcement when the researchers unblinded their analysis of the data and saw unambiguous signs of the boson.
“I still, thinking [about] that moment, get the butterflies in my stomach,” she said. “It was unbelievable. It’s really a unique moment in the life of the scientist.”
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