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Has the Higgs Boson Particle Field Been Hiding in Plain Sight?
sciencehabit writes with a link to the ScienceNow site, noting an article saying the Higgs boson may already have been found in previous observations of the known universe. A theorist at Michigan state is arguing that scientists may have already found evidence for the elusive particle. The key appears to be that the particles that make up the Higgs field are of various 'strengths', and some of those particles may tug on others very weakly. "The lightest Higgs can be very light indeed, but it would not have been seen at [CERN's Large Electron-Positron (LEP)], because LEP experimenters were looking for an energetic collision that made a Z that then spit out a Higgs. That wouldn't happen very often if the lightest Higgs and the Z hardly interact. 'Just within the simplest supersymmetric model, there's still room for Higgs that is missed,' Yuan says. However, this lightweight Higgs is not exactly the Higgs everyone is looking for, says Marcela Carena, a theorist at Fermilab. 'The Higgs they are talking about is not the one responsible for giving mass to the W and Z,' she says. It can't be because it hardly interacts with those particles, Carena says. Indeed, in Yuan's model, the role of mass-giver falls to one of the heavier Higgses, which is still heavier than the LEP limit, she notes."
Turns out it was under the couch all this time.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_Boson
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
Am I really the only one worried that determining the precise weight of the Higgs Boson will result in the Earth being crushed into a tiny particle the size of a pea?
Nasty Hobbitses...and their mean Higgses make Precious feel so heavy.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
You say that now, but she'll look better after a couple of drinkses.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
A lot of times they use charge. You can determine the charge of a particle and then place it in a known EM field and observe how quickly it reacts which gives you mass.
Yep that is correct. The photon is the carrier of the electromagnetic force, and light is an electromagnetic wave. The force felt between charged particles is caused by the exchange of virtual photons. All fields can be thought of as made of quantized particles. In the case of the fundamental forces: Electromagnetism - photons, Gravity - graviton (theorized), Weak Force - W and Z bosons, Strong Force - 8 colored gluons.
The mass of elementary particles is measured in units of energy (thank Albert Einstein for that connection), namely the electron-volt. Essentially, physicists look for the amount of energy it takes for a certain particle to come into existence. The photon does not have mass by definition, since it travels at the speed of light. The Higgs Boson, on the other hand, is expected to be quite massive.
Maybe we could put it to good use as a theme park ride instead. Imaging all those superconducting magnets accelerating your cart up to 99.99% of the speed of light - what a ride that would be.
With the relativistic effects, you might even be able to come out of the ride before you went in.
The fact that it operates in a vacuum might be a problem ... have to think about that.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
This is real news for real nerds. This story requires reading of Leon Lederman's the God Particle to get to the point where any amount of explanation in the summary would help. Maybe I'm exaggerating a bit, but I'd be really, really impressed if anyone could write a summary for that.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
What's this ... behind your ear ... ?
Oh, look! It's a Higgs boson!
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
Since nobody's made this point yet, I'll put it out there.
The statement is literally correct. Say you have a field in 3-space. That field itself is a 3-vector at every point in that space. When you make a fourier transform of the field, you get the field as a function of a momentum-like 3 vector. That vector is quantized, and the excitations of it are what we refer to as "photons". Add in special relativity, and you have the basics of quantum field theory.
Try the first chapter of Lahiri and Pal's "A First Book of Quantum Field Theory". If you've had undergrad calculus, it shouldn't be that bad.
The momentum of a charged particle can be measured from the curvature of the particle's trajectory in a magnetic field.
Energy can be determined through various means, which usually have to do with measuring the energy given off when the particle slows down when going through matter. For example, you could have a leaded glass block. As a fast-moving electron goes through the glass, it gives up its kinetic energy as it interacts with the atoms in the block. Eventually the kinetic energy is turned into a proportionate amount of light.
A more unusual technique is to measure the velocity of a charged particle by using the Cerenkov effect. Also, maybe photons and higgs boson do have mass, but our instruments just aren't sensitive enough (kinda what the summary is saying)? Photons may have mass, but experiments show that it would be very small. (Less than 6 x 10^-17 electron-volts) But the higgs, if it exists, surely has mass, because it is self-interacting, and it is interactions with the higgs field give mass to particles.
Mostly it comes down to conservation of mass/energy. If we know we put 3 electrons and 20GeV of energy into the reaction chamber and got out 2 electrons, 10GeV and one unknown particle then that unknown particle must have a combined mass/energy to balance things out. (Remember that E=mc^2 so mass could have been converted to energy and vice vesa.)
So how did they measure the mass of the first particle? As one of the sibling posts said, put an electrically charged particle into a static electric field and watch how fast the field moves the particle (this can be observed at the macroscopic scale using gas bubble chambers).
Of course the above requires you to know the charge of the particle, so how do we measure the charge of an elementary particle? Simple! Fill the air with neutrally charged oil droplets and "spray" them with the particle. Some droplets will pick up 1 particle and some will pickup 2 or 3 or 4. Put them in a static electric field and measure how strong the field has to be to suspend the droplets against the force of gravity. You don't have to know which ones picked up how many particle, you just have to measure the difference in the required field strength. (See the Oil-drop experiment; note measuring the mass of oil droplets is hard be macroscopically possible.)
So in summary: we measure particle mass in terms of the masses of other particles. The first particle's mass was measured in terms of it's electric charge. The first particle's electric charge was measured in terms of how much force it imparted on an oil droplet. The oil droplet's mass was measured relative to a lump of platinum-iridium sitting in Paris. That lump was just pointed to and called 1 kilogram.
Any questions?
Clearly the Higgs Boson was contained within an SEP field.
Which suggests that we are one step closer to actually creating an infinite improbability drive - the ramifications of which are... well I don't know, but they are at least big, possibly huge.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
You get a negative energy.
This is actually possible near the event horizon of a spinning blackhole. The zero energy state around a spinning blackhole is a particular orbit (I believe due to frame dragging, but I'm not positive), but a slower orbit must have lower energy which thus must be negative energy. The Penrose process uses this trick to extract energy from a blackhole.
Nope that's not a typo either. :) The potential goes at 1/r, the force (which is the derivative) goes as 1/r^2.
Simple .
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
It's all relative, friend.
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