Joyous celebration of the discovery of a new particle that looks like being the Higgs boson has been short-lived. Intense study of the properties of this elusive particle has already begun, according to two students from Chinese University working at CERN.
'I didn't see people popping champagnes at CERN but I do know some of them had celebration parties after work,' said Michael Tam Chun-nam, 21, a physics undergraduate sent to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva for summer research.
'The atmosphere here is back to usual now since everyone knows that the discovery of new particle is just a starting point, and research is still going on,' said Tam, who is part of a team analysing and looking for improvements in the tracking system of CMS, one of the two teams that announced the Higgs discovery.
Fellow physics undergraduate Frankie Li Tsun-Yin, 21 said the atmosphere at Cern was back to 'normal' and that 'everyone is still working very busily'.
He said: 'I don't know [if] there is any celebration. There may be for some professors.'
The discovery of Higgs would affect many ongoing experiments in a deep, but indirect way, said Chinese University physics professor Chu Ming-chung.
