Fermi Lab narrows down higgs boson mass!

The Higgs boson is an undiscovered subatomic particle that scientist believe is responsible for giving matter mass. It has been extremely difficult to create one in the laboratory because it's as hard to detect as it is elusive. Today however, scientist have at narrowed down the possible range of the higgs' own mass, putting it somewhere between 158-175 GeV/c2. I read also that the LHC has been up and running lately and so far scientist are taking it slow, just rediscovering other confirmed subatomic particles and they say thus far things are going great. All of their data is reconfirming the parts of the standard model we have correct, and they've even found candidates for the top quark for the first time in europe. Of course we've already produced a top quark in the states in 1995 but better embarrassingly late than never right?

source: "ScienceDaily (July 26, 2010) — New constraints on the elusive Higgs particle are more stringent than ever before. Scientists of the CDF and DZero collider experiments at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermilab revealed their latest Higgs search results at the International Conference on High Energy Physics, held in Paris from July 22-28. Their results rule out a significant fraction of the allowed mass range established by earlier experiments.

The Fermilab experiments now exclude a Higgs particle with a mass between 158 and 175 GeV/c2. Searches by previous experiments and constraints due to the Standard Model of Particles and Forces indicate that the Higgs particle should have a mass between 114 and 185 GeV/c2. (For comparison: 100 GeV/c2 is equivalent to 107 times the mass of a proton.) The new Fermilab result rules out about a quarter of the expected Higgs mass range."

By the way, the picture at the top is what the computers display at the LHC and other particle accelerators. Scientist shoot protons around a huge circular tube at 99.9999% the speed of light, in opposite directions and then collide them head on to break them into the even smaller particles. Each line represents the flight path of an individual subatomic particle as they fly through the air from the collision.