CGAL users discussion list

[Andreas Fabri <>]

                                                      Geneva, April 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, 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider )
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)