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Higgs Boson Not Found at 115 Gev

Posted by chrisd on from the standard-model-in-trouble dept.

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."

5 of 76 comments (clear)

  1. No need to restructure everything just yet... by Gaber · · Score: 3, Insightful

    They haven't ruled out the existence of the Higgs by any means.

    LEP couldn't probe the entire range of energies where the Higgs might reside, and there wasn't compelling evidence that they would be able to. That's why LEP was shut down; scientists at CERN wanted to begin work on LHC, which will replace LEP by 2005 (IIRC).

    Now the search for (and discovery of?) the Higgs will probably take place at Fermilab and LHC.

    And this business of requiring a "major restructuring" of current physics models is just exaggeration. People propose extensions to the standard model all the time; it's just that the standard model has described current observations and predicted new (and eventually confirmed) ones very well. There's no need to throw the entire thing out.

    -Gabe

    1. Re:No need to restructure everything just yet... by Gaber · · Score: 2, Insightful

      are you retarded..the lep was shtdown because the experiment was finished

      Different experimenters have different ideas about when an experiment is finished, and the shutdown of LEP was not as simple as you apparently believe.

      The "other group" refered to in the article, who claimed to have found the Higgs just before LEP was scheduled to be shut down, had a vested interest in keeping the experiment running; they had put a lot of time, money, and effort into it, and since LEP had almost enough energy to probe most of the energy range where the Higgs would most likely be found, they wanted to keep going for a few more months. The group that discovers the Higgs will most likely be awarded the Nobel prize in a few years, so the actual discovery of the Higgs effectively carries a very large cash prize.

      Now that LEP has been shut down (despite the claim that the Higgs had been seen), the Higgs will most likely be discovered at Fermilab. It's possible that the group at LEP who claimed to have seen the Higgs was just trying to keep the experiment running long enough to legitimately discover it themselves.

      It should be mentioned that the LEP group has claimed to have seen the Higgs several times over the past few years, and each time (including this latest one) more careful reanalysis of the data has revealed no legitimate signal.

      -Gabe

  2. You have to remember it is still only a theory... by -douggy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    As Richard Feynman said "If it disagress with experiment, no matter who said it, or how elegant it is, if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong."

    While the Higgs Boson and the Higgs field are very compelling and I am certainly not advanced enough in that area of physics to judge Higgs and the other creators of the standard model perhaps there is no Higgs Boson!

    I have no real other way of explaining but a lot of things would be nice if there were a drag for a "mystery field" like the ether of the 19th century, hopefully 21st century physics and mathematics will be able to tell us where this mass and inertia comes from.

  3. Broken models: Cool! by Marsh+Jedi · · Score: 4, Insightful
    I would be extremely happy if our instrumentation had finally become powerful enough to discover experimental evidence that breaks the model.

    The last huge time someone said, "Hold on--it should not be doing this!" was Planck, in 1900, when he found light quanta in black body radiation.

    Basically, Planck was expecting the color of the light of a hot body to increase smoothly as the temperature went up...(infrared, visible, UV, Xray, gamma)....Unfortunately, he found that in reality, it did _not_ go up smoothly....It went up in a staircase with billions of teeny tiny steps, meaning light is *quantized*. This effed up our entire model. All of it. Before this discovery, the precession of Mercury (ended up being a relativity thing) was the only thing people were having a tough time with. Then this hit and they had to develop a system of mechanics to deal with these quanta.

    Check out the next 15 years:

    1901: Max Planck, determination of Planck's constant, Boltzmann's constant, Avogadro's number and the charge on electron

    1904: Albert Einstein, energy-frequency relation of light quanta

    1905: Albert Einstein, special relativity

    1909: Robert Millikan, measured electron charge

    1909: Albert Einstein, particle-wave duality of photons

    1911: Ernest Rutherford, Infers the nucleus from the weird scattering of alpha particles on gold foil

    1913: Niels Bohr, quantum theory of atomic orbits. Same year: radioactivity as nuclear property

    1915: Albert Einstein, general relativity

    Not bad for fifteen years.

    Now, while we have made a lot of progress messing with these basic discoveries in cosmology, particle theory, quantum theory etc, we still have been refining these models. We haven't had to chuck the whole thing in a while.

    I want another fifteen years like this. But for this to happen, the thing needs to break. In half.

    Of course, I have a bias. I want zero point energy, flying cars and FTL travel. So I am praying for rain.

  4. This is just plain wrong! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    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."

    What the hell are you talking about?!
    The Standard Model works just fine with a Higgs boson mass greater than 115 GeV? This lacks even a vague resemblance to a "severe blow"! Heck, the minimal supersymmetric Standard Model extensions -- which tend to predict a "lighter" Higgs mass -- are not even close to ruled out by this fact. (You'd need to get above at least 170 GeV.) The only thing this casts any doubt on is the reports from the ALEPH experiment at CERN that they saw evidence for a Higgs at this energy. Even this last bit is hardly a surprise, since ALEPH had fairly poor statistics.

    Furthermore, yesterday's "solid state" article should not be taken of evidence of anything, save two facts: (A) physicsts, like anyone else, like to bullshit when they're drinking, and (B) some people like talking to journalists a little too much. If you take even a rudimentary look around, you'll see that none of these people who are criticizing reductionism have actually gone so far as to propose a specific theory, a general framework for theoretical model building, or even a couple of half-assed "principles" to guide people in their work. Face it. This is not science. It's just people getting windy.