“We observe in our data clear signs of a new particle, at the level of 5 sigma, in the mass region around 126 GeV. The outstanding performance of the LHC and ATLAS and the huge efforts of many people have brought us to this exciting stage,” said ATLAS experiment spokesperson Fabiola Gianotti, “but a little more time is needed to prepare these results for publication.”
http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressRel ... 7.12E.html
I personally thought it was quite cool that Dr. Peter Higgs, who predicted the particle in 1964, was present at the announcement.
Now they need to characterize the properties of the particle, determine whether it is indeed the Higgs boson, and figure out how it differs from existing predictions (if at all, although there are apparently some unexpected decay properties already). Whether it is actually the Higgs particle or not, it is the first new subatomic particle to be discovered in decades.
