The world’s most wanted subatomic particle, the Higgs boson, has been found.

On the finding, Ian Blatchford, Director of the Science Museum Group, said; ‘It is a powerful and optimistic day for science and a triumph for amazing patience and rational thinking,’

A small exhibit in the Science Museum is planned to open this week to mark the announcement today of the discovery of the Higgs boson by two teams, each consisting of 4000 scientists, at the CERN laboratory, Geneva, which operates the £5 billion Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator.

In addition, a major new exhibition on the LHC, developed in collaboration with CERN, will open at the museum next year. The LHC is designed to answer the most profound questions about the universe.

Alison Boyle, Science Museum curator of modern physics, says that the forthcoming exhibition will include components of ATLAS and CMS, as well as pioneering explorations of the atom by JJ Thomson, Ernest Rutherford, James Chadwick, and others. She adds: ‘Discovery of the Higgs boson is a great success but there’s still lots more physics to do, and our exhibition will follow the LHC’s scientists and engineers as they explore even higher energies.’

Thought to give all other particles their mass, the existence of the particle was predicted by Peter Higgs, who was recently interviewed in preparation for the major new exhibition at the Science Museum, and Higgs himself plans to attend.

Read more - see blog by Roger Highfield, External Affairs Director, Science Museum - http://sciencemuseumdiscovery.com/blogs/insight/higgs-boson-discovered/