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."

Comments

For those that went "wtf?!"

[moogied]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_Boson

Re:Higgses

[IndustrialComplex]

Nasty Hobbitses...and their mean Higgses make Precious feel so heavy.

Re:Higgses

[Shadow Wrought]

Higgses ...must be one of the ugliest plural forms I've recently encountered.

You say that now, but she'll look better after a couple of drinkses.

Re:The Higgs Boson

[dmitrybrant]

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.

Re:the last place you look

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep ... Were all doomed!

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson_(fiction) "In the science fantasy series Lexx, one character points out that although all-out nuclear war sometimes destroys all life on planets as advanced as Earth, it is much more common for such planets to be obliterated by physicists attempting to determine the precise mass of the Higgs boson particle, since the moment the mass is known the planet will instantly collapse into a nugget of super-dense matter "roughly the size of a pea."

Re:The Higgs Boson

[mdmkolbe]

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?

Re:Am I missing something?

[niklask]

I've never been 100% clear on this. Is the weak force really infinite but just drops off to effectively-zero faster than electricity and gravity to? Not really. Both electromagnetic and gravitational potentials have a simple 1/r dependence (because of massless mediating particles). If the mediating particle is massive then the potential is not as simple. Take the Yukawa potential which nicely describes pion exchange in the nucleus. It goes as exp(-mr)/r. Now, the Yukawa potential works for massive scalar fields. If the field is not scalar, like the W and Z bosons which are axial-vector bosons the potential is somewhat different, but the point is the same.

I've never seen an equation for weak or strong interactions corresponding to the Maxwell or Newton/Einstein equations for electricity and gravity. Is that because we just don't model weak force as a field because the particles don't move fast enough? Electromagnetic and weak interactions has been unified for a long time now and are nicely described by a Lagrangian. The strong interaction is much more complicated because of the self-coupling of the mediating particles. But that's not to say there is no Lagrangian.

Re:Am I missing something?

[ColdWetDog]

Lets take the simple case of a scalar potential V(r) which is given by the integral over the vector field F(r) along some path C. Hence, V(r) is proportional to 1/r for both gravity and electromagnetism.

Simple .

I don't think that word means what you think it means.