Physics Letters B, Elsevier's flagship journal in high energy physics, has announced that the observations of the long-sought Higgs particle, hailed as one of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time, have been published. The papers 'Observation of a new boson at a mass of 125 GeV with the CMS experiment at the LHC' and 'Observation of a new particle in the search for the Standard Model Higgs boson with the ATLAS detector at the LHC' are freely available online on ScienceDirect.
In July 2012, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva announced they had captured a new particle that may be the elusive Higgs boson in two gigantic experiments, ATLAS and CMS, both of which independently confirmed the particle's existence. A world-wide collaboration of more than 5,000 researchers contributed to the discovery.
The existence of the Higgs particle was first predicted in 1964 by three groups of leading physicists independently — François Englert and Robert Brout in August, Peter Higgs in October, and Gerald Guralnik, C. R. Hagen, and Tom Kibble (GHK) in November. Its discovery completes the Standard Model of particle physics and, most importantly, validates the theories developed over the last 50 years explaining how elementary particles can have mass.
Physics Letters B is the flagship journal in high energy physics. The journal will change from a subscription based model into an open access model by the start of 2014. The journal has been included in SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics), a new model for open access publishing. Benefits of publishing in Physics Letters B as part of the SCOAP3 model include perpetual open access, no charges to authors, wide re-use licenses as well as reduction and re-direction of subscription fees to centrally cover for article processing charges in participating journals.
