Science Higgs Boson found?

[Ghostrider]

Did the rights grant to the particles when they are captured are the same that those reserved to the humans, in the same circumstances?

:goodposting:

Usually we don't capture people by smashing them together at high speed.

Usually.

 

[Cairan]

A friend of mine asked me about the relevance of all that money put into particle research, and asked "But will it cure cancer??" ... I replied "I don't know, but if you were anywhere near the collision in the LHC, you'd sure as hell get one!"

 

[RisingFury]

General consensus though is that it is made up of a new brand of elementary particles. Here's an interesting article: Weakly interacting massive particles - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Again, the existence is hypothesized. Still interesting. Again due to the fact that they are so incredibly massive and only interact with weak force/gravity, the probability of an observational event is very very low. Very cool stuff though.

As I said, there's no evidence for their existence. And there is no general consensus. Nobody knows. Nobody would say anything. Hypothesis isn't evidence and a link to wikipedia from someone who probably knows less of particle physics than I do will not convince me otherwise...

 

[storm]

As I said, there's no evidence for their existence. And there is no general consensus. Nobody knows. Nobody would say anything. Hypothesis isn't evidence and a link to wikipedia from someone who probably knows less of particle physics than I do will not convince me otherwise...

http://nkn-india.wikidot.com/bio-newman

 

[Cairan]

I just invented a new drink for the science-minded: the Higgs Boozon.

I can't say precisely yet what's in it, however there is a strong probability, at 95% confidence level, that there is 2.5 oz of Geneva gin in the mix...

 

[Urwumpe]

A friend of mine asked me about the relevance of all that money put into particle research, and asked "But will it cure cancer??" ... I replied "I don't know, but if you were anywhere near the collision in the LHC, you'd sure as hell get one!"

Don't forget that one important spin-off of particle research is nuclear medicine, which does, in fact, cure cancer.

 

[Quick_Nick]

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120501.html
[ame="http://vimeo.com/41038445"]The Higgs Boson Explained on Vimeo[/ame]

 

[garyw]

The Higgs boson search continues ... into ANOTHER dimension

Now that all the fanfare over the sighting of a Higgs-like boson in the Large Hadron Collider has died down, CERN scientists have a few burning questions about the spotted particle.

The gigantic proton accelerator will be shut down this year, but physicist Paris Sphicas told The Register the boffins should be able to gather enough data about the particle's properties to tackle two of conundrums before the big switch off.

For those still baffled by last month's discovery, the proposed Higgs boson helps explain how everything around us actually exists: its own existence suggests that the Higgs field is real and that particles moving through this omnipresent field gain mass. The boson is therefore vital in propping up the Standard Model, which is modern science's least incomplete explanation of how the universe works.

However, although the Higgs field in theory gives everything else mass, it doesn't appear to be giving mass to the boson itself, a mystery that can only be answered with further study of this Higgs-like particle.

In order to confirm the spotted Higgs-like boson is the sought-after elusive elementary particle, it has to have certain properties, such as what particles it decays into and how often it decays into specific particles.

"If the Higgs is the guy who gives mass to everybody then its coupling - in other words the strength with which it engages the other particles - will be proportional to mass," explained Sphicas, a physicist working on the collider's general-purpose experiment CMS.

"So if you count how often it goes to particle A, B or C, that frequency should be strictly given by the mass of these particles."

Another important property of a Higgs boson is how it decays: a uniform manner will indicate the boson has "zero spin", otherwise it would be all over the place and therefore some other particle. The Higgs boson spin has to be zero because of its quantum nature.

"If that angular distribution of the stuff it breaks into is totally spherically symmetric, that would be spin zero. If it's anything else that would be one of the known particles," Sphicas said.

These are the answers that CERN hopes to find before the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is powered off and spruced up for its run at the highest energy level it can achieve: 14 teraelectron volts in 2015.

"Already, what we found is a boson, we know it's a boson, no doubt," the physicist said.

"What we don't know is whether it decays isotropically or not, that we will know by the end of the year, or it will be in the data that we collect by the end of the year so it may take a bit longer to get the results.

"The first hint of how often it decays to the different types of particles will also be obtained with the same data that we collect up to the end of the year. And the reason is that we will have enough events to see the new boson not just in the two channels we saw it in so far but also in a few others," he added.

So surely that'll be it, then: the spin is shown to be zero and the mass-giving mechanism checked, telling the boffins this is the Higgs boson. But actually, no, as Sphicas puts it, if this boson is the Higgs, that's the point at which the fun really starts.
This is just the end of the beginning

The Standard Model of our universe isn't actually looking all that tidy with the Higgs as it's currently described. There are problems with it – and the main hitch is why the Higgs field doesn't build the actual Higgs boson into a massive particle.

"The same mechanism via which the Higgs gives mass to all the other particles would give mass to itself," he said, adding:

Think of it this way: imagine the Higgs field as some sort of sea of water through which all the particles swim. Some particles encounter more resistance and some less, the ones that encounter more get massive and the others are the less massive ones.

Now a molecule of water also swims through all the other molecules of water so it also encounters resistance to its motion. What that means is that the more massive it is, the more it will interact with the Higgs field but the more it interacts the more massive it will become and that will mean the more interaction and in fact if you go through the math, you calculate that the same mechanism that gives mass to all the other particles would imply that the guy that does this has to have infinite mass itself.

The Higgs boson doesn't have infinite mass, so where does all that mass go? The two main theories are supersymmetry or extra dimensions - invisible or unseen places to stuff all the bits of the boffins' sums that don't come out right.

Supersymmetry, affectionately known as SUSY, posits a sort of mirror world where all the elementary particles are partnered by particles related to them that we can't observe. That mirror world would interact with our world in a way that would stop the Higgs boson becoming infinitely massive.

"There's two problems in our understanding of nature right now, one is dark matter and dark energy and the second is if this guy is the Higgs and therefore we've just found every single building block of visible matter, how can the Higgs not be infinite?" Sphicas said.

"Supersymmetry could be the answer to both," he added, admitting that he was a proponent of the theory.

Article and more: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/24/what_next_for_higgs/

 

[orb]

Nature: New Higgs results bring relief—and disappointment

Scientific American: New Higgs Results Bring Relief—and Disappointment:

This past July, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider announced that they had discovered a new particle that looked much like the long-sought-after Higgs boson. In fact, the Higgs-like particle they found was nearly perfect—based on the available data, it looked almost exactly like what the Standard Model of Particle Physics predicts the Higgs to look like. This finding gave physicists encouragement that they had finally bagged the elusive Higgs, but it fed the dread that the LHC won’t come up with any shocking new observations to puzzle over. For if physicists don’t find anything that conflicts with existing theories, how will we deepen our understanding?

This week physicists working at the LHC are sharing the first batch of Higgs data since that initial announcement. The LHC can’t observe the Higgs directly, of course, since it quickly decays into other fundamental particles. Instead, physicists must count up the number of particles that detectors observe and tease out those that may have come from a momentarily existent Higgs. If the Standard Model is correct, physicists know how many of these daughter particles they should see. Any deviation from these expected numbers would indicate that something is happening beyond the Standard Model.

Alas, most of the Higgs results being presented this week at the Hadron Collider Physics symposium in Kyoto, Japan, have been well within our standard understanding. Physicists at ATLAS and CMS, the two largest particle detectors at the LHC, have about double the amount of data they did in July; this new data hasn’t dramatically changed the tentative conclusion that the LHC is seeing a plain-old Standard Model Higgs.

To be sure, these are still early days, and with time and data physicists could learn that the Higgs differs from Standard Model predictions, or even that there’s more than one Higgs to be found.

And that’s also not to say the new results lack intrigue. In July, physicists found that the Higgs decays into two photons slightly more often than it was expected to. Could this have been a hint of new physics? Possibly. It could also just have been a statistical blip that would wash away in the coming flood of data. But while ATLAS and CMS physicists have this week updated their results for many other Higgs decays, on the question of photon decay they have chosen to remain silent. This week, the most tantalizing observation is the one that doesn’t exist.

{...}

Discovery News: Higgs Boson Likely a 'Boring' Boson

 

[Quick_Nick]

The comments are actually all very interesting.

 

[orb]

CERN: New results indicate that particle discovered at CERN is a Higgs boson

BBC News: LHC cements Higgs boson identification

RIA Novosti: Physicists Confirm Higgs Boson Discovery

LiveScience: Confirmed! Newfound Particle Is the Higgs

Discovery News: Confirmed! Newfound Particle Is the Higgs

NewScientist: Mystery boson earns Higgs status thanks to W particle

NBCNEWS.com - Cosmic Log: Is it THE Higgs boson? Stay tuned

 

[Notebook]

Higgs factory a 'must for big physics'
By Paul Rincon
Science editor, BBC News website
30 March 2018

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-43584969

 

[ADSWNJ]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-43584969

Particle physicist working with Higgs bosons asks for an even bigger, meaner particle machine then the LHC. No surprise there, I suspect!

 

[Notebook]

Can't blame them, can think of worse ways to spend a few billions. Giving it to me for a start.

N.