Observation of a new particle in the search for the Higgs boson

by mepcotterell • 14 years ago

29 10 14 years ago

copper• 14 years ago

Well, it does go on to say:

> This observation, which has a significance of 5.9 standard deviations, corresponding to a background fluctuation probability of 1.7x10^-9, is compatible with the production and decay of the Standard Model Higgs boson.

Technically it could be another particle with a 126GeV mass, though that's hopefully something more experiments will show one way or the other.

Zenst2• 14 years ago

I do wonder if the higgs is a funny creature in that it has a sort of quantum echo. By that I mean that it is in more than one place at once, this would also help explain why gravity is as weak as it is. If that is the case then you could think of the higgs as being like a bouncy ball with the decay of the various bounces all actualy happening at once (may explain those fluctuations). Though if you were to observe a bouncy ball and sample its movement slow enough then they would appear to be as one event. Just my theory of things and I hope more is proven given the higgs will help to one day make the theory of gravity a fully understood fact. My physics was formaly high-school level and the rest is from a passing interest of all things science so if I appear to be so wrong then maybe somebody could point out the details so that I may not make the same mistakes again.

Daniel_Newby• 14 years ago

The Higgs boson is not thought to be related to gravity, beyond giving mass to some particles. The Higgs particle is the "chunky" form of the Higgs field, just like a photon of light is a little chunk of electric field that has broken off and gone into business for itself.

If you have more questions about physics, ask /r/physics on Reddit. They people there are very nice and include several serious physicists.

dictus• 14 years ago

That's the hope. New result from the Tevatron just showed that this thing appears to decay to matter, too (not just gauge bosons) http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ex/0512051. It is looking very Standard Model like. An outside hope is that it doesn't couple to leptons. The CMS Higgs to tau tau result hinted as much, but it is very preliminary, unconfirmed by ATLAS. Measuring Branching Ratios (the rates that the new particle decays to different final states) will be a test of how Standard Model-like this new particle is. Here is CMS' paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/arXiv:1207.7235

Steko• 14 years ago

That's a lot of researchers, 3 Zimmerman's alone! Which 3 get their name on the Nobel Prize when it comes out?

pluies• 14 years ago

Zimmerman, obviously!

On a more serious note, it appears that the Nobel Prize can be awarded to organizations, which would make CERN the most likely recipient. This said, as far as I can say only the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded in such a way in the past.

lnguyen• 14 years ago

It's a big detector with a lot of parts.

Standard procedure is to list all the researchers involved in the project. Not everyone will be directly involved in the specific analysis to find the Higgs.

altarelli• 14 years ago

"1 the western equivalent value is 1'390 kCHF. 2 the western equivalent value is 5'450 kCHF"

http://lhcb.ecm.ub.es/spd/spd/General%20information/spd_cost...

InclinedPlane• 14 years ago

The Higgs wasn't the only predicted particle that evidence has been found for recently. It looks like the Fermi gamma-ray telescope found some decent evidence that cosmological dark matter is composed of neutralinos, which have a rest mass, oddly, about half that of the Higgs:

Evidence for gamma-ray halos around galaxy clusters: http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.1003

Evidence for a 130 GeV spike in gamma-ray emissions in certain locales: http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.1045

Observation of a new particle in the search for the Higgs boson

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