Researchers from the University of Oviedo have collaborated in the finding of a new particle which could be the wanted "Higgs boson", known as "The God particle", which explains the origins of matter. The group of High-Energy Physics of the Asturian academic institution, led by the Professor of the Department of Physics Javier Cuevas, has made an important contribution to the discovery presented today by the CERN (European Centre for Particle Physics).

The results of the CMS and ATLAS experiments have led to the discovery of a new particle that opens a new era in scientific exploration. The Higgs boson would have given mass to the rest of particles and, according to this, would have created the universe and all that exists.

The data on which the experiments are based come from the CERN's Large Hadron Collider, placed in the Franco-Swiss border, where 40 million proton collisions are produced per second at an energy level that cannor be produced by any machine. Between 300 and 600 of these collisions are registered and analysed.

The Asturian team is involved in the CMS experiment, one of the two general-purpose experiments of the LHC collider, during the last 10 years. For the last two years, according to Javier Fernández, Professor at the Departments of Physics, "we have participated in the analysis of CMS data about one of the Higgs boson disintegration channels, the WW channel".

Javier Cuevas, who is currently in Geneva with other two team members, is one of the coordinators of this analysis in the CMS collaboration, consisting of more than 3,000 physics from institutions and universities around the world.

"Our contribution to todays' results is not only limited to the rearch of the Higgs boson in the WW channel, but also to the study of the background taking part in it such as the production of WW and the top quark pair (tt), as in the search of New Physics in Supersymmetry models (SUSY)", add the Asturian researchers.

In the group of the University of Oviedo, apart from Javier Cuevas and Javier Fernández, there are other researchers such as Isidro González (Ramon y Cajal), Jonatan Piedra and Hugues Brun (CPAN postdoctoral fellows), Lara Lloret (FPU postdoctoral fellow) and Santiago Folgueras (pre-doctorate scholarship).

The participation of the Spanish research groups in the LHC particle accelerator also counts on the support of the Ministry for Economy and Competitiveness through the Particle Physics Program and the National Centre for Particlem Astroparticle and Nuclear Physics (CPAN), Consolider Ingenio 2010 Project. In the CMS project participate 179 centres from 41 countries, whereas in the ATLAS program participate 176 institutions coming from 38 countries.