Higgs Boson Not Found at 115 Gev

Larry writes "The most important part of the Standard Model, the Higgs boson, was not found in energies up to 115 GeV, according to this article on New Scientists. This, along with other drawbacks (such as the magnetic moment of the muon) delivers a severe blow to the Standard Model. This, along with yesterdays article on solid state physicists' theory, may call for major restructuring of current viable physics models."

Comments

Opinion of expert

[Mt._Honkey]

I attended a lecture by a senior researcher at LEP at CERN, and I saw many various collision images. They showed many of the simultanius bottom quark/anti bottom quark decays that you would expect from about 70% of Higgs decays. It looked convincing, but I do suppose that it could be background. As much as I don't want the higgs to exist, it did look good.

Re:Opinion of expert

[Mt._Honkey]

He said that there is no certain mass limit. He showed a graph of possible masses, and there was a certain area from around 60 to 300 GeV (if I remember correctly) where it probably lies, however there is nothing in the standard model that would put an absolute limit. So, I guess that technicly we could find a mind-bogglinly huge mass, but it is most likely on the order of the low hundreds of GeV. He suspects the mid hundreds, but that part was pure speculation.

Re:You have to remember it is still only a theory.

[alfredw]

Not necessarily true. What the experiments have found is that the Higgs must have an energy over 115 GeV. According to the Standard Model, this is OK. The Standard Model can't predict what the Higgs energy will be - it's an experimental parameter.

So nothing's broken yet. It just seems that if there is a Higgs boson, it's very massive and will require big accelerators to find.