Higgs boson: landmark announcement clears key hurdle

PARIS (AFP) - The announcement two months ago that physicists have discovered a particle consistent with the famous Higgs boson cleared a formal hurdle on Monday with publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

Two laboratories working at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern) had jointly announced on July 4 they had detected a new fundamental particle in experiments at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva.

The discovery has been hailed as one of the biggest scientific achievements ever.

The teams, from labs called Atlas and the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), on Monday each published their findings in the European journal Physics Letters B. They are available at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0370269312001852 and http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0370269312008581.