Geneva, April 1st, 2008
The Large Hadron Collider Together With the CGAL Periodic Triangulations Prove the Existence of the Higgs Boson
The Higgs boson was a hypothetical massive scalar elementary particle predicted to exist by the Standard Model of particle physics. Until yesterday, the Higgs Boson was the only Standard Model particle not yet observed. The proof of its existence is crucial to explain how otherwise massless elementary particles still manage to construct mass in matter.
What turned hypothetical existence in reality is the combination of (i) the photon collisions observed in the recently inaugurated Large Hadron Collider (LHC) together with (ii) the Periodic Triangulation package of CGAL, which allows to compute Delaunay triangulations of toroidal spaces in order to apply finite difference simulations without dealing with artificial boundary conditions.
"We knew that hardware alone, buried in a circular tunnel under the Alps, and combined with a 128K triple-core processor grid, simply wouldn't do the job,", said Irene Eneri, the LHC project leader, "What it additionaly needed were cleverly designed algorithms for complex shapes, and what we got from the folks of the CGAL project was beyond the keenest expectations of everybody -- even of the project officer of our EU funded Hicks project."
The downside of this breakthrough result is that the PhD student who worked on the periodic triangulations stopped working, telling everybody, that whatever he still finds out during his career is irelevant, as he expects to get the Fields Medal in about 9, and the Nobel Prize for Physics in about 32 years.
Champagne !!!! (Higgs)
The directors,
Robert Aymar (CERN), Andreas Fabri (GeometryFactory), Sylvain Pion (cgal.org)
