If the sets for "Decay," a super-low-budget flick about zombies at the Large Hadron Collider, look incredibly realistic — well, that shouldn't be surprising. The movie was filmed at the home of the LHC, Europe's CERN physics complex on the French-Swiss border, right under the noses of the authorities.

But don't worry: Everything's cool with CERN, even though they didn't know about the film in advance. The 75-minute movie is a hit, especially when you consider that it cost the grad students who made it just $3,500. And there's no danger that the Higgs boson has a "bio-entanglement" effect that turns underground workers into zombies, as portrayed in the movie.

The film was written and directed by Luke Thompson, a Ph.D. physics student at the University of Manchester who has been working on a project at CERN known as the LHeC experiment. The other masterminds on the "Decay" team included Manchester Ph.D students Hugo Day (stunt coordinator) and Clara Nellist (assistant director). The 20 cast members had no real film experience and worked with props that were scavenged or built by the crew, according to the Mancunion newspaper.

"Decay" was screened for the first time last month in Manchester, and this weekend it made its online debut as a free video on YouTube and the DecayFilm.com website. Thompson told me in an email that he and his fellow filmmakers have been "overjoyed at the reception thus far":

"Reactions have been hugely positive (especially considering it is, after all, the Internet!) and it's great to be getting so much coverage. The premiere in Manchester on the 29th of November was fantastic, and the audience really got into the film, which was great for all of us to experience.

"The tunnels in the film are indeed at CERN, but they're not the LHC tunnels. 'Our' tunnels are the basement-level maintenance tunnels linking many of the buildings at CERN just below ground. These mainly allow access to water pipes and so forth, but nothing critical for the running of CERN or the LHC. As such, they're not restricted access. On the other hand, access to anything important or dangerous, such as the LHC tunnels themselves, is tightly controlled. There are many kilometres of these maintenance tunnels, so of course the film doesn't show them all, but it does show a wide range of them. Many areas have their own unique 'feel,' and where possible we chose locations based on that, depending on what atmosphere we wanted to convey. We show some of the overground part of CERN as well, including (the outside of) the real ATLAS control room building, but of course most of the film is underground. We did try to give an 'overview' of what CERN is really like in the opening credits, before going crazy with the bad science :)

"The idea was entirely based on the location; some of us had been exploring CERN early in our Ph.D.s and, particularly in the case of the tunnels, thought it would make a great setting for a horror movie. We didn't think much more of it at the time, but a few months later it came up again, and we decided to actually make a zombie movie. We perhaps didn't realise how ambitious the project was at the time!

"As for the future: My Ph.D. will be done within about 6 months, after which I'll be doing a further six months' work on the LHeC project. Beyond that, I'm not sure. I've really enjoyed doing this film and have added filmmaking to my already too-long list of hobbies, so it's absolutely something I'll at least continue casually. That said, it's a tricky industry to make a living in, and as great as the reception has been, it's still an amateur film — so I'm not expecting any Hollywood projects to fall into my lap!"

CERN spokesman James Gillies told me that "Decay" wouldn't have been green-lighted if the students had asked, but now that it's out, there's no harm done. Gillies played it cool in his email:

"That film was made by a bunch of grad students in the kind of locations you describe [non-sensitive areas such as conference rooms and maintenance tunnels]. They did not ask permission until the whole film was in the can, at which point they asked us for an endorsement. We took the position that, even though we would not have granted permission had they asked before filming, it would not make any sense for CERN to try and block the film. The underground areas were the basements of the CERN main building complex and connecting tunnels on the Meyrin campus.

"Our criterion for accepting filming requests is based on the portrayal of scientists, not on the accuracy of the science. As you know, we worked with Sony Pictures on 'Angels and Demons.' Even though the science in that film was far from accurate, the scientists were well-portrayed. That's not the case for 'Decay.'

"What do folks think? For my part, it's the product of a bunch of grad students doing the kind of thing grad students do in their spare time.

"Can the Higgs field cause zombification? Well let's just say that the science in 'Decay' is at least as wide of the mark as the science in 'Angels and Demons' ..."

So, once again, LHC zombies are nothing to worry about. It's only a movie. That will surely come as a relief to the kid in this video. 

More about physics at the movies:

• Reality check on 'Angels and Demons'
• How I created an algorithm for Spider-Man
• Physics in the realm of Hollywoodland!
• The physics behind the movie magic

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Scientists say they've discovered a type of particle that's never been seen before — a particle that mostly matches the description of the fabled Higgs boson.

"This is a very, very preliminary result, but we think it's very strong," said Joe Incandela, spokesperson for the CMS experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider.

Hundreds thronged to an auditorium at the CERN particle-physics center near Geneva to hear the latest from the LHC, and thousands more watched the proceedings on computers and big screens around the world. The timing of today's briefings was most convenient for Europeans as well as researchers attending the International Conference on High-Energy Physics in Australia, but video-viewing parties were organized as well in the middle of the night for scientists and science fans in the United States.

"As a layman, I would now say, I think we have it," CERN Director General Rolf Heuer told the audience in the auditorium. "Do you agree?"

His question sparked wild applause.

Expectations matched
The advance buzz suggested that researchers would report observations of a previously unknown particle that fit the characteristics of the Higgs boson. Last December, the teams behind the LHC's ATLAS and CMS experiments reported seeing "tantalizing hints" of the Higgs, and since then, the experiments have doubled the amount of data collected from hundreds of trillions of proton collisions at higher energies.

The results presented by Incandela were in line with expectations. "We have observed a new boson," he reported. Incandela set the mass level of the new particle at 125.3 billion electron volts, or 125.3 GeV, plus or minus 0.6 GeV.

Results from the ATLAS experiment also pointed to "clear signs of a new particle" in the range of 126.5 GeV, spokesperson Fabiola Gianotti said in a statement. The uncertainty factors were wide enough for one particle to produce both of those reported values. CMS and ATLAS serve as backups for each other, and the fact that the same phenomenon was observed at both detectors added to the solidity of the claims.

Physicists said more data would have to be collected to confirm that the particle was truly the Higgs.

"To say you've discovered the Higgs ... it's a complicated story," CERN theoretical physicist John Ellis said in a video prepared in advance of today's briefings. "It's one thing to see evidence of a new particle, but you have to check whether it has the right properties. And to check whether it has the right properties will actually take quite a bit of extra work."

After today's announcement, Heuer alluded to the job ahead. "We have to find out which kind of Higgs boson this is. ... We have discovered a boson, and now we have to determine what kind of boson it is," he told reporters. Later, he said "we can call it a Higgs boson, but we cannot call it the Higgs boson."

Getting the full picture would take time. "Ask me in three, four years," after the LHC reaches full power, Heuer said.

Fermilab physicist Don Lincoln, who is a member of the CMS research team, agreed that a little caution was in order. "It is definitely a boson, and it looks and smells like the Higgs. But until we do all the senses ... we won't know for sure," he told me.

ATLAS Collaboration

A computer graphic shows a candidate Higgs boson decay in the Large Hadron Collider's ATLAS detector, resulting in four muons. The event was recorded on June 10.

$10 billion effort
Identifying and studying the Higgs boson is the main objective of the $10 billion LHC project. It was the only fundamental subatomic particle predicted by the current theory on the subatomic structure of the cosmos, known as the Standard Model, which had yet to be found. It was hypothesized back in the 1960s, by British physicist Peter Higgs and others, as part of a mechanism to explain why some subatomic particles have mass while others don't.

"If that [Higgs boson] would not exist, then you would not exist," Heuer said.

Heuer called the discovery "the last missing cornerstone" of the Standard Model, but other physicists said there was still a chance that the newfound boson wouldn't mesh with the Standard Model.

"If the new particle is determined to be the Higgs, attention will turn to a new set of important questions," University of California Irvine physicist Andy Lankford, the deputy spokesperson for the ATLAS experiment, said in a statement. "Is this a Standard Model Higgs, or is it a variant that indicates new physics and other new particles?"

In that scenario, studying the Higgs could open the way for explorations of the weirder corners of physics, such as the idea that our universe has six or seven extra dimensions, or the claim that there should be an unseen supersymmetric partner for every one of the subatomic particles that have been detected, or the nature of the stuff that mysterious dark matter is made of.

In a CERN Bulletin interview, theoretical physicist Ignatios Antoniadis said the discovery could rule out some of the options for theories on the nature of the universe: "Because of its low mass, such a Higgs boson would allow us to rule out theories known as 'Technicolor' and some of the theoretical models used in supersymmetry. However, other supersymmetric-or-not scenarios could still apply, as well as extradimensional theories."

CERN

British physicist Peter Higgs accepts a round of applause during the CERN seminar at which researchers announced the discovery of a particle with the characteristics he predicted.

The discovery also could send Peter Higgs, who is still active in the field at the age of 83, to the top of the line for a Nobel Prize in physics. Higgs, a professor emeritus at the University of Edinburgh, and several other physicists who were involved in formulating the theory attended today's CERN briefing.

After the announcement, Higgs offered his congratulations to everyone involved in the LHC experiments. "To me, it's really an incredible thing that it's happened in my lifetime," he said before choking up with emotion.

Metrics for a discovery
To claim a formal discovery, the results from the LHC had to reach a confidence level of 5 sigma, which means there'd be just one chance in 3 million that the findings are a statistical fluke. Earlier this week, researchers at Fermilab in Illinois shared what they said were their final results from the Tevatron collider, which has been eclipsed by the LHC and was shut down last year. The results of their Higgs quest came up to a level of only 2.5 sigma — not enough to count as a true discovery.

Today, Incandela announced that the results from the CMS detector in one of the expected decay modes for the Higgs boson had a "combined significance of 5 standard deviations." Word of that measurement was greeted with applause in the CERN auditorium.

"It's nice to be at 5," Incandela said.

Other results from CMS, however, fell just short of the 5-sigma standard — and in at least one decay mode, the expected signs of the Higgs were not present at all. That could be just a fluke in the data, but Incandela said the analysis would continue with more readings. When all the results were combined, the confidence level for CMS was set at 4.9 sigma, he said.

Gianotti, meanwhile, said the combined results from the ATLAS experiment reached 5 sigma, signaling a discovery. That revelation, too, drew applause. In at least one of the decay modes, the readings from ATLAS were much higher that what would be expected for the Standard Model Higgs — but it's too early to tell whether that is merely a statistical anomaly or the sign of an unexpected twist that theorists will have to wrestle with.

"This is just the beginning," Gianotti said. "There is more to come."

In a news release, CERN said the results would be published in a scientific journal around the end of the month, and more data would lead to firmer conclusions by the end of the year.

Reactions to the particle discovery:

• Physicist Stephen Hawking, in an interview with the BBC's Pallab Ghosh: "The results at Fermilab in America, and CERN in Switzerland, strongly suggest that we have found the Higgs particle — the particle that gives mass to other particles. If the decay and other interactions of this particle are as we expect, that will be strong evidence for the so-called Standard Model of particle physics, the theory that explains all our experiments so far. This is an important result, and should earn Peter Higgs the Nobel Prize. But it is a pity, in a way, because the great advances in physics have come from experiments that gave results we didn't expect. For this reason, I had a bet with Gordon Kane of Michigan University that the Higgs particle wouldn't be found. It seems I have just lost $100."
• CERN Director General Rolf Heuer: "We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature. The discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson opens the way to more detailed studies, requiring larger statistics, which will pin down the new particle’s properties, and is likely to shed light on other mysteries of our universe.”
• CERN research director Sergio Bertolucci: "It’s hard not to get excited by these results. We stated last year that in 2012 we would either find a new Higgs-like particle or exclude the existence of the Standard Model Higgs. With all the necessary caution, it looks to me that we are at a branching point: the observation of this new particle indicates the path for the future towards a more detailed understanding of what we’re seeing in the data."
• Energy Secretary Steven Chu:"I congratulate the thousands of scientists around the globe for their outstanding work in searching for the Higgs boson. Today's announcement on the latest results of this search shows the benefits of sustained investments in basic science by governments around the world. Scientists have been looking for the Higgs particle for more than two decades; these results help validate the Standard Model used by scientists to explain the nature of matter."
• Nigel Lockyer, director of Canada's TRIUMF particle physics lab: "With ATLAS and the LHC, we set sail in the direction toward what we thought was the land of the Higgs. Last December, we saw a smudge on the horizon and knew we could be getting close to land. With these latest results, we've seen the shoreline! We know we’ll make it to dry land, but the ship is not in to shore just yet."
• Peter Knight, president of the Institute of Physics: "This is the physics version of the discovery of DNA.  It sets the course for a brand new adventure in our efforts to understand the fabric of our universe. ... Akin to a moon mission, one of the most remarkable things about the hunt for the Higgs is how the effort has caught the public imagination.  Not since the Apollo missions 40 years ago has there been such a sense of popular excitement around scientific discovery.  Long may this continue to inspire the next generation of scientists."

Previous episodes in the Higgs hunt:

• Video: Michio Kaku on the discovery
• Theorist Peter Higgs lives to see his boson
• PhotoBlog: Subatomic snoozing
• The Higgs boson made simple
• Leaked video says Higgs-like particle observed
• Has Higgs been found? Almost
• How the Higgs gives things mass
• Higgs boson hits new highs
• Ups and downs for Higgs boson buzz
• Cartoons visualize the Higgs boson
• Can physicists crack the big puzzle?
• Flash graphic: Inside the Big Bang Machine
• Flash graphic: Michio Kaku on LHC nightmares and dreams
• Msnbc.com's special report on the Large Hadron Collider

Some of the (other) blogs with Higgs boson updates:

• ViXra.org: Physicist Philip Gibbs blogs about boson buzz.
• Not Even Wrong: Columbia physicist Peter Woit's blog.
• Resonaances: Adam Falkowski counts down to H-Hour.
• Cosmic Variance: Sean Carroll and company weigh in.
• Quantum Diaries: Aidan Randle-Conde tracks Higgs hunt.
• A Quantum Diaries Survivor: Tommaso Dorigo on the case.
• Of Particular Significance: Reality check from Matt Strassler.
• The Guardian: Live-blogging the CERN announcement.

Last updated 9 p.m. ET July 4.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

So what's the Higgs boson, and why are people spending billions of dollars to find that god-danged subatomic particle? I've rounded up a variety of resources aimed at showing you why the hunt for the Higgs is a big deal.

First, a little context: The Higgs particle, and its associated field, were hypothesized back in the 1960s by British physicist Peter Higgs and others to fill a weird gap in the Standard Model, one of physics' most successful theories. The model as it stood had no mechanism to explain why some particles are massless (such as the photon, which is the quantum bit for light and other types of electromagnetic radiation), while other particles have varying degrees of mass (such as the W and Z bosons, which play a part in the weak nuclear force). By rights, all particles should be without mass and zipping around freely.

The Higgs mechanism sets up a field that interacts with particles to endow them with mass, and the Higgs boson is the particle associated with that field — just as photons are associated with an electromagnetic field. For more than four decades, physicists have assumed that the Higgs field existed, but found no experimental evidence for it. It requires a super-powerful particle smasher such as the Large Hadron Collider to produce energies high enough to knock a Higgs boson into existence under controlled conditions.

But the heavy particles created in a collider exist for just an instant before they decay into lighter particles. The LHC's physicists have been looking for particular patterns in the spray of particles that match what they'd expect to see from the decay of the Higgs boson. They've collected data for roughly a quadrillion proton-on-proton collisions, and on Wednesday they'll announce the status of the Higgs search based on those conclusions. (Tune in the webcast.)

The teams at the LHC's ATLAS and CMS detectors are likely to say they're pretty sure they see a new type of particle with Higgs-like characteristics, but will need more time to nail down those characteristics completely. If that's the case, physicists can then go on to find out if the Higgs mechanism works exactly the way they expected it to, or whether there are unexpected twists. Some of the theories about how the universe is put together are pretty far-out — for example, suggesting that there are several dimensions in space that we can't perceive directly, or that there are huge troops of subatomic particles that we haven't yet discovered. Following the tracks left behind by the Higgs could reveal whether there's any truth to those theories.

Analogies, please!
For decades, experts have been trying to come up with analogies to illustrate how the Higgs mechanism works. One of the best-known was proposed in 1993 by David Miller, a physicist at University College London. Imagine looking down from a balcony in a ballroom, watching a cocktail party below. When just plain folks try to go from one end of the room to the other, they can walk through easily, with no resistance from the party crowd. But when a celebrity like Justin Bieber shows up, other partygoers press around him so tightly that he can hardly move ... and once he moves, the crowd moves with him in such a way that the whole group is harder to stop.

The partygoers are like Higgs bosons, the just plain folks are like massless particles, and Bieber is like a massive Z boson.

The Guardian's Ian Sample demonstrates a variant of this analogy in a 4.5-minute video: Imagine a tray with ping-pong balls scattered on it. The balls roll freely around the empty tray. But then, if you spread a layer of sugar over the tray, the balls sitting on the piled-up sugar don't roll so easily. The grains of sugar introduce a kind of inertial "drag," and that's the kind of effect that the Higgs field supposedly has on particles with mass.

In a 60-second shot of science written for Symmetry magazine, Howard Haber of the University of California at Santa Cruz uses a livelier comparison to a high-speed bullet plowing through a vat of molasses.

What good is it?
Particle physicists try to avoid forecasting the applications of an experimental advance before the actual advance is confirmed, but in the past, advances on a par with the discovery of the Higgs boson have had lots of beneficial applications, and some that are more questionable. The rise of nuclear power and nuclear weaponry is a prime example of that double-edged sword.

The discovery of antimatter is what made medical PET scanning possible, and antimatter propulsion could eventually play a part in interstellar travel, just like on "Star Trek." Particle accelerators have opened the way to medical treatments such as proton eye therapy — as well as advances in materials science, thanks to neutron scattering.

It's conceivable that the discoveries made at the Large Hadron Collider will eventually point to new sources of energy, Michio Kaku, a physicist at City College of New York, told me during a discussion of the LHC's promise and peril. And if the discovery of the Higgs leads to fresh insights into the fabric of the universe, it's conceivable that we could take advantage of the as-yet-unknown weave of that fabric for communication or transportation. Who knows? Maybe this is how "Star Trek" gets its start.

Visualizing the Higgs
If one picture can be worth a thousand words, how much are six videos worth? Here are half a dozen videos that delve more deeply into the Higgs boson and its significance. Be sure to tune in CERN's webcast starting at 3 a.m. ET for the latest revelations.

Silly and serious talk about the Higgs boson: 

• Higgs-like leak? Video says new particle observed at LHC
• Here's how the famous Higgs particle gives things mass
• Contest for Higgs explanations: The Waldegrave Higgs Challenge
• Humor from the Borowitz Report: 5 questions for the Higgs boson
• Les Horribles Cernettes sing 'Hey, Mr. Higgs'
• National Geographic: The God Particle
• BBC: Science of the Higgs boson explained
• Berkeley Lab: What's up with the Higgs?

Some of the (other) blogs to watch for Higgs boson updates:

• ViXra.org: Physicist Philip Gibbs blogs about boson buzz.
• Not Even Wrong: Columbia physicist Peter Woit's blog.
• Resonaances: Adam Falkowski counts down to H-Hour.
• Cosmic Variance: Sean Carroll and company weigh in.
• Quantum Diaries: Aidan Randle-Conde tracks Higgs hunt.
• A Quantum Diaries Survivor: Tommaso Dorigo on the case.
• Of Particular Significance: Reality check from Matt Strassler.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Michael Hoch / CERN file

The Compact Muon Solenoid, or CMS, dwarfs workers at the Large Hadron Collider during construction work in 2007. A leader of the CMS' scientific team says in a CERN video that physicists have observed a new particle that may have characteristics consistent with the Higgs boson.

A mistakenly leaked video from Europe's CERN particle-physics center reports that a new subatomic particle has been observed at the Large Hadron Collider, in the range where the long-sought Higgs boson is expected to lurk. The video has now been put into password-protected status, and CERN says viewers shouldn't "take anything for granted" until a much-anticipated seminar on the Higgs boson hunt takes place on Wednesday.

"We've observed a new particle. ... We have quite strong evidence that there's something there," Joe Incandela, spokesperson for the LHC's CMS experiment, said in the video, which was discovered by Science News on CERN's website. "So, to ascertain its properties is still going to take us a little bit of time."

Incandela said the particle has some of the characteristics associated with the Higgs boson, which plays a key role in hypotheses that explain why some subatomic particles have mass while others don't. Finding the Higgs is a key target of the $10 billion LHC project. Its discovery could open the way to new frontiers in physics, such as the study of extra dimensions and supersymmetry.

Consistent with the Higgs
The physicist said that the particle decayed into two photons, in a way consistent with Higgs' behavior. He also said it's 130 times as massive as a proton — which is within the expected mass range for the Higgs.

"This is very significant," said Incandela, a physicist from the University of California at Santa Barbara who was the first U.S. scientist to be elected spokesperson for an LHC experiment. "This is the most massive such particle that exists, if we confirm all of this, which I think we will. ... This is something that may, in the end, be one of the biggest discoveries, or observations, of any new phenomena that we've had in our field in the last 30 or 40 years, going way back to the discovery of quarks."

If the particle's characteristics correspond to the predictions provided by some of the theories on the frontier of physics, "then we're really seeing something very, very closely tied to the  fabric of space and time, something that's really fundamental to the universe, and that represents a major discovery, perhaps as big as the discovery of quarks, perhaps as big as the discovery of antimatter," Incandela said.

Incandela characterized the CMS team's find as "very strong evidence," but he downplayed the use of the word "discovery" — a word that physicists reserve only for the most solid findings, with only one chance out of 3 million that the result is a statistical fluke. Instead, he emphasized the term "observation," which he said means that the particle is "definitely there, and it's very unlikely to go away."

He said the particle could be the kind of Higgs boson that fits perfectly with the existing theory of particle physics, the Standard Model, or it could be an unorthodox type of particle that doesn't fit the model. "If that's the case, then we have something really profound here," he said. "It could be a gateway to the next phase of exploring the deepest parts of the fabric of our universe."

He emphasized that CMS' results were only preliminary, and did not refer to any claims from the ATLAS collaboration, the other team most heavily involved in the search for the Higgs. But he did say he expected the results to be sufficiently confirmed to lead to a scientific publication by the end of July.

"We're very excited," Incandela said.

A tipoff? Or a red herring?
The video, which was dated July 4, appeared to provide a tipoff to the announcement planned for Wednesday. Incandela's comments reflected what the pre-announcement buzz has been: that the CMS and ATLAS teams observed an anomalous particle with the characteristics of the Higgs, with a confidence level close to that required to claim a discovery. 

However, this was just one video interview with one senior researcher, and it's not clear how much the video will reflect what the team leaders will say at the seminar. When the video came to light, outside physicists cautioned that the full story may turn out to be different.

"Really, we need to see ATLAS and CMS data side by side, e.g., are peaks in the same places?" theoretical physicist Robert Garisto, an editor at Physical Review Letters, told me in a Twitter conversation. On the other hand, he said, "I wouldn't bet against the Higgs now."

CERN spokesman James Gillies struck a similar note of caution. He told me today that the Incandela interview was "one of several videos that we recorded to cover all the bases." CERN tried to keep all of the advance videos password-protected, to guard against premature release, but "one of them became visible for a short period of time ... we don't know why."

The ATLAS and CMS teams, from their spokespersons on down, are trying to abide by Wednesday's embargo on their findings.

"Until the seminar tomorrow, don't take anything for granted," Gillies told me. You can watch CERN's webcast of the particle-physics fireworks beginning at 3 a.m. ET.

Update for 2:30 p.m. ET: Credit for spotting the video on the CERN website goes to Science News' Kate Travis.

Previous episodes in the Higgs hunt:

• Has Higgs been found? Almost
• How the Higgs gives things mass
• Higgs boson hits new highs
• Ups and downs for Higgs boson buzz
• Cartoons visualize the Higgs boson
• Can physicists crack the big puzzle?
• Flash graphic: Inside the Big Bang Machine
• Flash graphic: Michio Kaku on LHC nightmares and dreams
• Msnbc.com's special report on the Large Hadron Collider

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

CERN

The CERN Neutrinos to Gran Sasso experiment sends muon neutrinos through a tunnel at the French-Swiss border in the direction of a detector in Italy, more than 450 miles away.

Months after researchers reported that they measured neutrinos traveling faster than light, they're finding that the incredible result may have been due to a bad connection rather than a violation of Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity.

The potential instrumental glitches, first reported by ScienceInsider's Edwin Cartlidge, is addressed in a statement from the OPERA Collaboration, the group behind the controversial neutrino-beam experiments.

Last year, the OPERA team made ultra-precise measurements of how long it took for neutrinos to make the 450-mile (732-kilometer) trip between the CERN particle physics lab on the French-Swiss border and Italy's Gran Sasso National Laboratory. When they took the speed of light and a wide variety of other experimental factors into consideration, they determined that the neutrinos arrived 60 nanoseconds before they should have.

If the results were to stand up, they'd mark the first failed test for Einstein's century-old theory. That's one reason why researchers found them so hard to believe, even though a repetition of the experiment yielded the same results. The OPERA team has been reviewing the entire experiment, and several other research groups have been trying to replicate it. A key concern has been the Global Positioning Satellite system used to clock the neutrinos' transit time. The measurements are required to be so precise that the relativistic effects of Earth's gravitational field on the GPS system had to be taken into account.

Now sources familiar with the OPERA review say scientists have identified two potential problems with the experimental apparatus. One has to do with a fiber-optic connector that sends a GPS time stamp to the experiment's master clock. That connector may not have been functioning correctly when the neutrino-timing measurements were made, and as a result, the recorded flight time would be shorter than the actual time. That alone could explain the seemingly faster-than-light results.

Another potential problem has to do with the oscillator that was used to generate the time stamps for GPS synchronization. This problem could have made the flight time look longer than it really was.

The sources I contacted via email declined to be identified because they weren't authorized to speak in advance of the statement issued Thursday. One of the scientists said the glitches should not be characterized as "errors," but instead as "nasty instrumental effects."

CERN spokesman James Gillies confirmed that the GPS connector problem was being investigated, but he emphasized that the effects still had to be confirmed. "More beam will be needed before we know for sure," he told me in an email. Tests with short pulsed beams have been scheduled for May.

Update for 9 a.m. ET Feb. 23: CERN has issued the expected statement about the potential glitches:

"The OPERA collaboration has informed its funding agencies and host laboratories that it has identified two possible effects that could have an influence on its neutrino timing measurement. These both require further tests with a short pulsed beam. If confirmed, one would increase the size of the measured effect, the other would diminish it. The first possible effect concerns an oscillator used to provide the time stamps for GPS synchronizations. It could have led to an overestimate of the neutrino's time of flight. The second concerns the optical fibre connector that brings the external GPS signal to the OPERA master clock, which may not have been functioning correctly when the measurements were taken. If this is the case, it could have led to an underestimate of the time of flight of the neutrinos. The potential extent of these two effects is being studied by the OPERA collaboration. New measurements with short pulsed beams are scheduled for May."

Update for 1:53 p.m. ET Feb. 23: Here's a similar statement from Italy's nuclear research institute, INFN:

"The OPERA Collaboration, by continuing its campaign of verifications on the neutrino velocity measurement, has identified two issues that could significantly affect the reported result. The first one is linked to the oscillator used to produce the event's time-stamps in between the GPS synchronizations. The second point is related to the connection of the optical fiber bringing the external GPS signal to the OPERA master clock.

 "These two issues can modify the neutrino time of flight in opposite directions. While continuing our investigations, in order to unambiguously quantify the effect on the observed result, the Collaboration is looking forward to performing a new measurement of the neutrino velocity as soon as a new bunched beam will be available in 2012. An extensive report on the above mentioned verifications and results will be shortly made available to the scientific committees and agencies."

More about those pesky neutrinos:

• Faster-than-light neutrinos pass test
• Neutrinos spark wild scientific leaps
• Faster-than-light neutrinos? Not so fast, some say
• Challenging Einstein is usually a losing venture
• Interactive: Putting Einstein to the test
• 'Virtually Speaking Science': Podcast on weird physics

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or following the Cosmic Log Google+ page. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Gold electrodes are inserted into a vacuum chamber and cooling assembly. These electrodes are a key part of the trap in which positrons and antiprotons are "mixed" to form antihydrogen.

After years of effort, scientists have confirmed that they've corralled individual atoms of antimatter.

"We're over the moon," Aarhus University's Jeffrey Hangst, spokesman of the ALPHA collaboration at Europe's CERN particle-physics center, told me today. "I think this was the hardest step in the whole business."

Hangst and his ALPHA colleagues report the breakthrough in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

What's so big about making antimatter? On one level, it sounds like the sort of thing mad scientists would do -- for instance, in the Dan Brown thriller "Angels and Demons," which was made into a movie last year. But on a deeper level, studying antimatter sheds light on the fundamental structure of the universe.

In the beginning, equal amounts of matter and antimatter came into existence. At least that's what scientists believe. Today, antimatter is virtually absent in the natural world. Physicists assume that all that antimatter was annihilated when it came into contact with matter -- and that for some as-yet-unknown reason, the matter we know and love had enough of an advantage for a remnant to survive.

Some of the scientists at CERN are using the Large Hadron Collider to sort out that antimatter mystery, but Hangst and others work at a different facility, known as the Antimatter Decelerator. ALPHA is one of the scientific collaborations that has been mixing antiparticles -- positrons and antiprotons -- to try to create whole atoms of antihydrogen.

It's not easy, because of that mutual-annihilation issue. Hangst said the first trick was to combine the particles in a super-cold vacuum setting --- less than 0.5 Kelvin, or -458.8 degrees Fahrenheit. That way, the particles don't instantly jump away and fizzle out. The second trick is to build a magnetic trap to help contain the particles so that they don't instantly decay. And there's a third trick: designing a system capable of verifying that the atoms actually exist.

"You must have a trap, and you must be cold, and you must be able to detect that you've done this," Hangst said.

The ALPHA team's detection system looked for the particles given off when the anti-atoms eventually decayed.

"When antihydrogen decays inside the ALPHA experiment, it emits particles, called pions, from the point at which it exists," the University of Liverpool's Paul Nolan, another member of the ALPHA team, explained in a news release. "Our detector surrounds the area where antihydrogen is formed, and for each pion emitted we get three points as it travels outwards. Using a computer, we can then construct a line between these points and trace it back to the origin of the antihydrogen."

When tens of millions of antiparticles were combined within ALPHA's magnetic trap, the system spotted 38 "annihilation events," verifying the existence of 38 antihydrogen atoms. The atoms lasted for just a tenth of a second, but even that duration would be long enough to allow for further study.

Hangst said the detection marked a "giant leap" toward understanding the properties of antihydrogen, and perhaps eventually sorting out the mystery behind the matter-antimatter imbalance. "Now we have to design the next device, the one that can actually do precision measurements," he said.

Hangst now feels the next giant leap -- measuring the spectrum of antihydrogen and seeing how it compares with regular hydrogen -- is in sight. "I've never been more confident that we can do this," he told me. "It's going to take some years, but the dream of shining laser light on antihydrogen and interrogating its structure is close now."

ALPHA isn't the only scientific collaboration trying to make antihydrogen. Another group, called ATRAP, is using the same facility. "This was a race between us and ATRAP, trying to do the same thing with different techniques," Hangst said.

And in a news release issued today, CERN noted that another collaboration, ASACUSA, has demonstrated yet another method for making antihydrogen atoms. ASACUSA's scientists report in a paper appearing in Physical Review Letters that they produced antihydrogen in a Cusp trap, which CERN says is an "essential precursor" for making a beam.

"With two alternative methods of producing and eventually studying antihydrogen, antimatter will not be able to hide its properties from us much longer," Yasunori Yamazaki, a physicist at Japan's RIKEN research center and a member of the ASACUSA collaboration, said in CERN's news release.

But will the bad guys use all this information to build an antimatter bomb like the one in "Angels and Demons"? That scenario is still pure science fiction, and you can hear theoretical physicist Michio Kaku explain why in our "Nightmares and Dreams" interactive.

More about antimatter:

• Inside the antimatter factory
• Antimatter particles detected deep below
• Antimatter scout to hitch ride on shuttle
• Laser technique produces blast of antimatter

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.