The Higgs discovery

On the flight to Melbourne, Australia, I close my eyes and reflect on the day. What a day! July 4, 2012 will be a day to remember: another one like this may not come in my career. Essentially, we have announced the discovery of the Higgs boson today. I think back on the scene.
The seminar at CERN is due to start at 9 in the morning. The seating is limited, so we have lined up outside the Main Auditorium since 1 am. Mostly young people, students and postdocs, who have the stamina to stay up all night; some of us working on our laptops, because the work never stops, others drinking, chatting, playing cards; everybody wondering what the other experiment has. A discovery must be confirmed by both of the major experiments at the Large Hadron Collider: ATLAS and CMS. I am a member of ATLAS, and we have kept our results carefully hidden from CMS. CMS has tried to do the same, but there are rumors that they also have a '5-sigma significance', which is the statistical threshold needed for discovery in this field.
The auditorium door opens at 7:30 am. We troop in. Almost half of the auditorium is reserved for VIPs, who include political hotshots from the CERN member countries as well as some of the biggest names in high-energy physics. There comes Peter Higgs, who hypothesized the scalar boson back in 1964. 48 years of relentless search is about to bear fruit. The atmosphere is tremendous, with people trying to hide the inner excitement and look grave for the occasion.
Joe Incandela presents the CMS results: excesses in both diphoton and four-lepton decay channels. Combined significance: 5 sigma. Yes! Then Fabiola Gianotti steps up to present the ATLAS results. This is one of the most influential women in the world, the spokesperson for a 3400-people collaboration. The same picture is seen by ATLAS: excesses in diphoton and four-lepton channels. Combined significance: 5 sigma. So this is it, the discovery is confirmed! Standing ovation in the auditorium, the applause goes on for 3 minutes, my palms are all pink. Rolf Heur, CERN's Director General, makes the formal statement: 'we have it'.
Now I think back on all the work that has gone in. I decided to be a particle physicist all those years ago in high school, standing beside the ping-pong table in Scholastica. Later, in my second year at Harvard, I dubbed myself a Higgs Hunter and resolved to be part of the Higgs discovery, if the boson exists at all. Since I completed my PhD, I have been working on the WW channel, which is the most sensitive Higgs decay mode in the low mass range. That is only my personal story; extremely hard work by hundreds of people over years has gone into the making of this morning. Notwithstanding, I am proud of the moment, proud of representing my country here at the pinnacle of science, of knowledge and of human achievement.
The next phase is to measure the properties of this particle: couplings, spin, parity. Is this really the Standard Model Higgs boson, or something more exotic? The latter possibility is definitely the more exciting one. So there is much work to be done. But for now, I am off to Melbourne to attend the International Conference for High-Energy Physics, a few days of relative leisure away from CERN.

Dr. Kashif did his undergraduate studies at Yale University, received a PhD in Physics from Harvard University, and is now a postdoctoral researcher with CERN/University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is based at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.