Higgs Boson Confirmation Now One Step Away

CERN says it only has one more variable to confirm before it can officially confirm that the particle it discovered is indeed the hypothetical Higgs boson.

The particle is currently officially labeled as Higgs-like, referring to its similarities to an imaginary particle described by physicist Peter Higgs among others. His model (in very simplified terms) describes particles traveling through a sticky energy field that slows down the particles and gives them mass. This in turn would form the basis of much of our understanding of how things work in the universe, for example the way objects are affected by gravity.

If the model is correct, there must be a specific particle that hasn’t previously been detected, known as the Higgs boson. CERN announced the discovery of a new particle last July and is still working on identifying it.

With Sherlock Holmes-style logic, this process has largely involved trying to eliminate every other possibility for what CERN found until the only possible explanation is that it is indeed the Higgs boson. Much of this research has involved testing the way the particle interacts with other particles.

CERN now says the last remaining factor is confirming the particle’s spin. This is a characteristic of each particle, though the name is more of an analogy and it doesn’t literally refer to the type of rotational movement that “spin” more commonly implies.

Each particle has a spin factor that is described by a number, but this is more like a category than a unit of measurement. Those with a spin that is a whole number (integer) are known as bosons.

CERN has now reached the point where ” All the analysis conducted so far strongly indicates spin-zero, but is not yet able to rule out entirely the possibility that the particle has spin-two.”

If it is indeed spin-zero, the particle is a perfect match for the theoretical Higgs boson and the world of astrophysics can celebrate completing the ultimate in jigsaw puzzles: the Standard Model theory that explains, to put it simply, how everything works. The next step after confirming the particle as the Higgs is to see if there’s anything unpredicted about it that means the Standard Model might need tweaking.

If it does turn out to be spin-two, it open up two new questions. Firstly, does the Higgs boson actually exist? Secondly, just what exactly did CERN discover last year? In both cases, one possible answer is that there are actually multiple types of Higgs boson.

Today’s announcement is perhaps best summed-up by Robert Garisto of the Physical Review Letters journal who tweeted “So it may well be a ‘vanilla Higgs’, though there are still hints of unseen sprinkles.”



Very exciting times we live in.

 

So we'll finally be able to understand gravity then? Good. Steps closer simulated gravity in spaceships.

 

actually we can already do that with rotational movement

 

Anti-gravity and propulsion systems based on gravity / anti-gravity.

 

gee, nothing like jumping the gun a little, one more test and they might have KNOWN what it was. They are teases:angrymob:

 

A Higgs Boson may add mass, gravity effects mass.

 

Well, "Publish or Die" and all that... :suspicion:

 

It is that time of the year too, grant time

 

An update to the story:

A newfound particle discovered at the world's largest atom smasher last year is, indeed, the Higgs boson, the particle thought to explain how other particles get their mass, scientists reported today (March 14) at the annual Rencontres de Moriond conference in Italy.

Physicists announced on July 4, 2012, that, with more than 99 percent certainty, they had found a new elementary particle weighing about 126 times the mass of the proton that was likely the long-sought Higgs boson. The Higgs is sometimes referred to as the "God particle," to the chagrin of many scientists, who prefer its official name.

But the two experiments, CMS and ATLAS, hadn't collected enough data to say the particle was, for sure, the Higgs boson, the last undiscovered piece of the puzzle predicted by the Standard Model, the reigning theory of particle physics.

Now, after collecting two and a half times more data inside the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — where protons zip at near light-speed around the 17-mile-long (27 kilometer) underground ring beneath Switzerland and France — physicists say the particle is the Higgs.

"The preliminary results with the full 2012 data set are magnificent and to me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson though we still have a long way to go to know what kind of Higgs boson it is," said CMS spokesperson Joe Incandela in a statement.

Dave Charlton, ATLAS spokesperson agreed, the new results "point to the new particle having the spin-parity of a Higgs boson as in the Standard Model," referring to a quantum property of elementary particles.

To confirm the particle as the Higgs boson, physicists needed to collect tons of data that would reveal its quantum properties as well as how it interacted with other particles. For instance, a Higgs particle should have no spin and its parity, or the measure of how its mirror image behaves, should be positive, both of which were supported by data from the ATLAS and CMS experiments.

Even so, the scientists are not sure whether this Higgs boson is the one predicted by the Standard Model or perhaps the lightest of several bosons predicted to exist by other theories.

Seeing how this particle decays into other particles could let physicists know whether this Higgs is the "plain vanilla" Standard Model Higgs. Detecting a Higgs boson is rare, with just one observed for every 1 trillion proton-proton collisions. As such, the LHC physicists say they need much more data to understand all of the ways in which the Higgs decays.

From what is known about the particle now, physicists have said the Higgs boson may spell the universe's doom in the very far future. That's because the mass of the Higgs boson is a critical part of a calculation that portends the future of space and time. Its mass of 126 times the mass of the proton is just about what would be needed to create a fundamentally unstable universe that would lead to a cataclysm billions of years from now.

"This calculation tells you that many tens of billions of years from now there'll be a catastrophe," Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., said last month at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

"It may be the universe we live in is inherently unstable, and at some point billions of years from now it's all going to get wiped out," added Lykken, a collaborator on the CMS experiment.

 

WOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

The universe is gettin' BLOW'D UP!!

 

[video=youtube;bMOzvxQHywM]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=bMOzvxQHywM#t=29s[/video]