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."

Comments

Re:god?

[morgan_greywolf]

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.

Higgs is the GOD particle

[wizardforce]

From the article:

The current rumor, which comes in time for the summer conference circuit, may be different. It claims an experiment at the Tevatron has found a peak twice as high as the previous rumors' bumps. And unlike the other rumors, this one includes details: the new particle's mass, for instance, which fits within theoretical bounds on the standard model Higgs. Some versions include a decay chain, which describes what the new particle turned into as the experiment progressed, and which may be consistent with the standard model's predictions.

the higgs particle is one of the last yet undiscovered predictions of the standard model.

But what happens if the Higgs turns out to be just right? Well, then the standard model predicts that you'd need a machine roughly a quadrillion times more powerful than the LHC to find anything new.

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.

Re:Higgs is the GOD particle

[The_Wilschon]

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.

IIRC, the standard model Higgs has not been excluded yet. But a whole lot of people are expecting to see SUSY (supersymmetry) at the LHC, so those same people also expect to see a SUSY Higgs rather than a standard model Higgs.

The Tevatron is still running, and running better than it ever has been before (higher luminousity). Well over 2 fb^-1 of data have been taken so far, and by the end in 2009, about 8 fb^-1 are expected. A few months ago, CDF published a new measurement of the W boson mass, which is coupled to the Higgs mass, which suggested that the Higgs mass ought to be fairly low. A fairly low mass Higgs might be observable at the Tevatron, so a whole lot more people than before are looking for the Higgs a whole lot harder than before. This W mass measurement is probably the "rumor" referred to in TFSummary.

Of course, we can't just look at one event and say "Oh look! I saw the Higgs boson!" There are a lot of other processes that have signatures very similar to the Higgs signature (I've worked on measuring one of those processes, Z + b jet), so we need to have a lot of Higgs events in order to distinguish them from background events. The top quark discovery was announced with, IIRC, 22 top pair events. I'd guess that we'll need even more than that number of Higgs events to have a decent Higgs discovery measurement.

Even if the Tevatron does discover the Higgs, don't worry, there will still be plenty for the LHC to do. Measure the properties of the Higgs, for one. But more importantly, within a few months of LHC startup, we should see SUSY.

Also, I've said it before, and I'll say it again, Fermilab and CERN are not in competition. CDF and D0 might be considered to be in competition, as might ATLAS and CMS. But not really even with those pairs. It is science, and it is scientists. We are concerned with getting science done, wherever it is done. An enormous number of the people at Fermilab now are either already also working at CERN or are planning to start CERN work soon. The fact that a Fermilab designed system failed is not indicative that Fermilab is trying to sabotage CERN, but rather just that people make mistakes. Fermilab has no incentive to sabotage CERN.

Re:god?

[WaZiX]

"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...

Re:god?

[morgan_greywolf]

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.

A few corrections

[Roger W Moore]

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!

Re:god?

[Chemicalscum]

The term "god particles" was pushed by the Nobel prizewinning particle physicist Leon Lederman (though he may not have invented the term) he even wrote a popular book with this name. He was Director of Fermilab back in the early nineties during the push to get congressional funding for the Superconducting Super Collider which was designed to find the Higgs Boson.

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.