July 31, 2012, Seoul – STMicroelectronics (ST), a global semiconductor company providing various electronic applications, congratulated the research team that led the search on the news that the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) had succeeded in tracking the Higgs boson after a long time.

ST specially developed and supplied components for the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) and ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus), the two detectors of CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for the search for the Higgs boson.

Carmelo Papa, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Industrial & Multisegment Business Unit at STMicroelectronics, said, “This project is a multinational endeavor involving thousands of people who built the equipment, collected and processed data, and verified the results. ST places great significance on the fact that we participated, even if it was not a large part, in the work of uncovering important facts about the universe and human nature.”

CMS is a particle detector that helps understand how matter came into existence after the Big Bang by observing how collisions between protons convert energy into particles of finite mass. ST has supplied thousands of silicon sensors for CMS since 2002. These sensors require extremely high accuracy at die sizes that are about 100 times larger than typical semiconductor dies. ST had the capability to produce these high-purity sensors by utilizing high-quality in-house manufacturing processes.

For the ATLAS detector, ST developed radiation-hardened positive and negative voltage specialty regulators, which were used in liquid argon calorimeter electron systems, pixel detectors, transition radiation detectors, and other subsystems. ST was awarded the 2006 ATLAS Supplier Award in recognition of its development of these regulators, which were developed at a time when ATLAS scientists could not find a device capable of safely delivering sufficient current when exposed to high levels of radiation. ST has also supported the satellite and space industries with the same technology for many years. Regarding voltage regulators, ST supplied over 40,000 radiation-hardened diodes to ATLAS.

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Higgs particle project
According to the CMS and ATLAS team on July 4, they succeeded in discovering a new particle that matches the Higgs boson with a mass of 125 GeV[1]. The supporting data for this research result indicates that the probability of this discovery being a statistical fluke is only 1 in 3.5 million.

In the 1960s, theoretical physicist Peter Higgs hypothesized the existence of the Higgs boson (a quantum particle associated with the Higgs field, just as a photon is a quantum particle associated with a magnetic field). There is a mechanism developed by scientists to explain research results that overturn the Standard Model of particle physics—the most accurate theory today describing the fundamental particles that make up all matter in the universe and the effects of the electromagnetic, weak, and strong forces on these fundamental particles—and the key elements of this mechanism are the Higgs field and the Higgs boson (Higgs particle).

Previous experiments conducted at the LHC have confirmed the Standard Model of particle physics to less than 1%, but have confirmed that the Higgs boson has not yet been seen. CERN Director General Rolf Heuer stated, “This is a historic milestone, but it is only the beginning,” concluding that the project will have an international impact in the future through international efforts and success.