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Search for Higgs "God Particle" Gets Interesing
holy_calamity writes "The Large Hadron Collider is in trouble again. It will start work sometime in spring 2008, not November this year as planned. The delay has been blamed on an 'accumulation of minor setbacks,' and comes on top of a 'design fault' that saw breakdown of magnets supplied by the competing Fermilab. Yesterday Slate nicely rounded up increasingly loud rumors among physicists that Fermilab may already have seen the Higgs particle, the 'holy grail of particle physics' the LHC was build to find."
They are undoubtedly talking about the still-only-theoretical Higgs boson, that's supposed to explain the difference between massless particles like the photon and other particles that have mass. Basically, if the Higgs boson is found, it goes along way to proving various Grand Unified Theories (GUTs) of cosmological physics.
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the higgs particle is one of the last yet undiscovered predictions of the standard model.
if we find the higgs it makes the standard model more convincing as far as its predictive power but by no means means it is correct.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
That he doesn't exist.
*please mod informative, please mod informative*
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
"God"? What has god got to do with this?
It's often referred to as the God particle because of its significance in physics, it would explain why matter has mass.
It probably also has a lot to do with the fact that the existance of the Mass-Free Higgins Boson particle was theoretically predicted, but has never been observed (until now?). This elusiveness to be observed and hence proven it existed is probably the reason why it got this nickname...
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Actually the Higgs won't prove anything about GUTs. It's part of the Standard Model.
The problem with most GUTs is that they make assumptions that certain things, like the Standard Model of particle physics, are true. The problem is that the Standard Model is unproven, as the Higgs boson has never directly been observed.. If the Higgs boson can be observed, it goes a long way towards proving the Standard Model, which in turn, helps to support various GUTs that depend on the Standard Model.
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Supersymmetric Higgs is the equivalent particle (actually 5 particles, IIRC) to the Standard Model's Higgs boson which is predicted by a Quantum Field Theory which includes supersymmetry and predicts all of the particles that we have already seen.
A few corrections. a SUSY Higgs is NOT the equivalent of adding 5 new particles to the SM but, infact involves doubling the number of particles and then adding 4 new Higgs bosons (since the SM already has one). What you are thinking of is a two Higgs doublet model which does NOT require SUSY i.e. we can have 5 Higgs bosons without Supersymmetry.
But more importantly, within a few months of LHC startup, we should see SUSY.
Woa! Nobody should expect to see SUSY ANYWHERE! For all we know, although it is a beautiful theory, it may be completely wrong! Even if it does occur in nature it may not occur within reach of the LHC energies. While the solution to the fine tuning problem would require SUSY at a "low" energy (compared to the GUT scale!) the upper limit is very rough. If SUSY occurs at 10TeV it is somewhat unnatural but by no means a huge problem even 100Tev is probably not out of the question - and this is assuming that nature uses SUSY to solve finte tuning - it may well not. Don't get me wrong - I'm someone looking for SUSY - and I hope to see it but it is by no means expected no matter how keen theorists get about it!
The thing is, there is a good probability that we've already created at least one Higgs boson at Fermilab. The problem with this kind of science isn't making one, it's that you have to make 3000 (or more). The problem then is that you lose 3000 of them because the decay chains of the Higgs boson turns into something you can't separate from background (along with other event selection requirements), this eliminates 99% of the potential Higgs events. In the next stage you then lose another 70% of the remaining events because the kinematics of the ideal decay look like a background (you can still extract some statistical significance from them, however). This leaves you with a handful of events that are 'signal like', seeing these events has to be statistically significant, so you have to know the errors on your models and on the data very well (the error isn't on the data itself, it's on our understanding of the data; i.e.. the calorimeters don't measure energy perfectly, so that error is here).
So if we discover it, it's not because of one Higgs being produced, it's because we've collected enough events that look like Higgs, separated them from the background and understood the errors on our measurements. It's a very difficult task.
I worked with the chair of the Higgs group at CDF last summer, it was rather enlightening. They have a lot of work to do though. What it comes down to is there are two competing experiments/detectors at Fermilab, CDF and D0. They do not cooperate very much to keep them from becoming biased and so they have confirmation of discoveries. Back when LHC was looking to turn on in 2007, the only way Fermilab could possibly have a Higgs discovery is if the two experiments collaborated and released a joint Fermilab Higgs result. Even then, Fermilab would quite possibly need to be (statistically) lucky for the result to be a discovery of the Higgs. Now however, with an extra half year of data, analysis and checking, Fermilab might just discover the Higgs before the LHC even turns on. Even after the LHC turns on, it'll take a while for Physicists working on LHC to analyze the data, so the Fermilab people have a bit of time there as well. Agreed, or at least a "-1 Uninformed".
I think he pushed the term to try to get approval from the religious right in congress who were typically suspicious about funding big science. They SSC ended not getting funding anyway. Primarily because of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the congressman no longer felt the need to pony up for any big project the physicists proposed as which they thought would give them technical superiority over the Soviets (and maybe the new super weapon of mass destruction). So the funding motion fell.
The religious right was certainly not going to fund the cathedrals of science. Anyway Lederman was not really using the term in the sense that Christians or religious Jews would, but rather in the same way that Einstein used the word "God" to mean the totality of physical law.