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CMS Collaboration / CERN
This proton-proton collision, recorded with the Large Hadron Collider's Compact Muon Solenoid last year, shows the characteristics expected from the decay of the Standard Model Higgs boson to a pair of Z bosons. One of the Z particles subsequently decays to a pair of electrons (green lines and green towers), and the other Z decays to a pair of muons (red lines). The event could also be due to known Standard Model background processes
The subatomic particle discovered last year at Europe's Large Hadron Collider is looking more and more like the fabled Higgs boson, the one fundamental piece that's been missing from the theory that governs particle physics. But at a widely anticipated conference in Italy, physicists said they can't yet confirm 100 percent that this is the particle they're looking for.
Ever since the "Higgs-like particle" was detected, researchers at the LHC have been trying to determine whether this is the one true Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model, or whether it's just one of several subatomic particles that play a role in imparting mass to other particles. There's even a chance that this particular particle something completely different, possibly linked to the way gravity works, said James Gillies, a spokesman for the CERN particle physics center on the French-Swiss border.
CERN is the international organization in charge of operating the world's biggest and costliest particle accelerator.
The key to confirming the particle's status is to determine a property known as spin, CERN says. If the new particle is spin-zero, then it's a Higgs boson. If it's spin-two, it's something else. The latest results, presented at the annual Moriond conference in La Thuile, Italy, can't yet rule out a spin-two particle, CERN said.
"Until we can confidently tie down the particle's spin, the particle will remain Higgs-like," CERN research director Sergio Bertolucci said in a statement on Wednesday. "Only when we know that is has spin-zero will we be able to call it a Higgs."
Physicists will continue to analyze the data collected at the LHC over the past couple of years, and there's a good chance they'll come up with the confirmation in the months ahead — even though the collider was shut down last month for an upgrade that's expected to require two years of work. That's not guaranteed, however. Raymond Volkas, a physicist from Australia's University of Melbourne, told New Scientist that Higgs-watchers might have to prepare themselves for the possibility that the LHC will never fully confirm the mystery particle to be the Standard Model Higgs.
Last year, scientists were intrigued by an extra "peak" in the data from ATLAS, one of the LHC's main detectors. Some wondered whether that hinted at the existence of two Higgs bosons instead of just one. But now that more readings have been added to the analysis, the anomalous peak is fading.
"When we first saw this excess a year ago, we were excited that it may be real physics and we hoped that by this time we would have a truly significant effect," the ViXra Log's Philip Gibbs writes. "This has not happened."
Gibbs said that yet-to-be-released findings are said to throw even more cold water on the two-boson hypothesis. "This means that expectations of significant BSM [beyond Standard Model] effects from run 1 are now lower," he wrote.
Update for 4 p.m. ET: The consensus appears to be that the results presented at the Moriond conference firm up the Standard Model's view of the subatomic world — which is a bit of a disappointment for those hoping to see clear signs of new physics. "It may well be a 'vanilla Higgs,' though there are still hints of unseen sprinkles," Robert Garisto, editor of the Physical Review Letters, joked in a Twitter update.
"Vanilla" was also the word used by Caltech theoretical physicist Sean Carroll in his Twitter assessment, although Harvard's Lisa Randall replied that there was still a chance of getting "vanilla swirl." On his "Not Even Wrong" blog, Columbia mathematician Peter Woit says it's looking like a "garden-variety [Standard Model] Higgs, which is discouraging for hopes of hints about how to get beyond the Standard Model."
The headline on Wired's report pretty much sums up the mood: "This Just In: Higgs Boson Still Boring."
More about the Higgs boson:
- Physicists to share latest word about Higgs quest
- Higgs-like particle may foretell end of universe
- Special report on the Large Hadron Collider
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.
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Boyle is the best science writer in the MSM today. Nice job and glad to see NBC keeping its finger on the pulse of fundamental results in physics.
Thanks for the kind words, Bob ... Guess I'll keep on plugging away :-)
I wish they'd hurry up. I'm getting impatient for the antigravity drive.
How does a Higgs Boson impart mass or gravity to a particle that is not moving? It does not. They only have a little over 400 detected events (Higgs like particles) out of the all the smashing and smashing they did over the years. One would think that something that gives mass and gravity to all other particles would be a little more common.
The particle that they found will have nothing to do with gravity, I bet $ on it. It is still an important discovery as it is still a previously undiscovered particle. I am curious of the results from the one satellite they put up that was measuring electron and positron annihilations. They were supposed to be releasing that information sometime soon and will have to search for it.
I find it funny that I have to use a different web site/browser to find a news article that is only 2 hours old and from MSN. Science and math not front page news there...shocking I tell you.
I can't answer how the Higgs boson imparts mass or gravity - not an expert in particle physics. Maybe someone who is can answer better. But I do understand that the Higgs is more properly defined as a field, which only can be observed as a boson under conditions of exceptionally high energy. It is the field that normally would provide the mass of any other particle, and mass is what generates gravity. As to any object or particle "not moving" - I don't think that is possible. Everything is moving relative to everything else, at least on a universal scale. Even a chair sitting immobile in your living room is moving relative to our solar system, the galaxy, and the rest of the universe.
As to the reasons why it is so hard to detect the Higgs boson:
1. It requires exceptionally high energy to create the boson, and that has only been possible since the Large Hadron Collider was built by CERN.
2. The LHC was built in 2008. fully functional in 2009, but only was ramped up to energies high enough to possibly detect the Higgs in 2012. So really, they never had the system tuned and operational at the proper energies until last year. Not years (plural), as you seem to think.
3. The tricky part is finding the right energy range. Can't just flip a switch, turn it on, and - badda boom - out pops a Higgs boson. The particle beams have to collide just right, at just the right energy. And the Standard Model is still loose enough that the energy range needed was not very specific. If this really created the Higgs boson, it would do a lot to tie up some of those loose ends.
The jury is still out, but if they really found the Higgs boson, I'll certainly take that bet. ;)
I'm sure we'll see a lot more Higgs Bosons once personal hadron colliders become the norm.
While I understand the disappointment of not finding anything that points to physic's beyond the "Standard Model", it seems to me that physicists should be, at least a little bit excited, by the fact that it is looking more like a conformation of the existence of the Higgs Boson.
I am a philosopher and do not claim to be a physicist.
I don't think that the Higgs particle is the ONE, to explain the standard model.
New Scientist in its latest magazine wrote that we have run out of explanations for the Universe. When we investigate the
physical universe we investigate the effect of some creation. Big Bang must have been created somehow. I believe that if
we put this creation into mathemathical form, a lot of the puzzles we have today will vanish.
Consciousness might have existed since The Big Bang.
I have a 180 degree interpretation of Big Bang.
Read a lot more about this theory at www.crestroy.com
Creation of the universe implies that there is a beginning and an end, why should there be? Think of time as a continuum of change, specifically, energy changing from one state to another. Energy cannot be created nor destroyed, same as time.
One way to visualize it is instead of thinking of time, think in terms of ratios of velocities and space, i.e. in any given space the energies (and particles) move with a certain speeds. Speeds can be added by adding the number of different energies states there are from one point to another. Hence, the whole concept of the universe then simplifies to a mere summations of different energy states.
Stephen Hawking said that he lost 100 dollars betting the Higgs boson wouldn't be found. If he paid already, he may have lost the 100 dollars, but he hasn't lost the bet yet. We have to wait until 2015. According to CERN Research Director, Sergio Bertolucci, "Only when we know that it has spin-zero will we be able to call it a Higgs." On top of that, scientist, Raymond "Volkas says that physicists and Higgs-watchers may have to prepare themselves for the possibility that the LHC data never establishes whether or not the particle is the Higgs predicted by the standard model," New Scientist reports. 2015 will be 48 years from the time three physicists received the Nobel prize for the first edition of "The Standard Model" of subatomic physics with the "Higgs mechanism," but they had all given up and gone to other pursuits after the 1967 paper that eventually sparked the award. Why? Something has been holding back the hunt for the Higgs. See the Facebook Note notes/reid-barnes/has-something-been-holding-back-the-search-for-the-higgs-boson/430347917017788
suhprize suhprize suhprize, it's the seventh quark!! I'll take my accolades in jelly beans.....sad the man is down to wire on a nobel prize, like can't we hire some more chimpanzee interns to do some more number cruncing or something?....I saw a link for a super computer made out of the rasberry pi if they need a link or something.....I gotta a suspicion on this one but things are happening in other parts of the sci world and I gotta divert my attention there instead....great, cern has their own sequestration program...it's called drunk all day and drunk all night...hea ye hea ye....It had come to the attention of our lord and master, lead phizzysycst and bad hair day himself, 2pi4r, that a bean counter has infiltrated our mists........