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LHC Discovers New Particle That Looks Like the Higgs Boson
The wait is over: new submitter Roger W Moore (among many, many other submitters) writes "The ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN have just announced the discovery of a new particle which is consistent with a Standard Model Higgs boson. There is still a lot of work to do to confirm whether this really is the Higgs, and if so whether it is a Standard Model Higgs, but this is a major result."
In the press conference, Dr. Higgs summed the findings up nicely: "This is an achievement in experimental methodology." To detect this signal has required a momentous effort, and the good people at CERN have had the good fortune of reaching results quicker than anticipated.
This isn't earth-shattering news or anything even unexpected, but it is still cause for celebration. Let us rejoice and then continue to push on towards new findings.
Here's a good introduction to the Higgs boson and why it matters.
Anand Rangarajan anand@cise.ufl.edu
The Higgs particle is just the particle manifestation of the Higgs gauge field. Think of it as a huge block of jello through which all massive objects move. 125 GeV is the energy required to scoop out a bit of that jello and isolate it.
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That's because they're not in competition as such. The results are complimentary. The Tevatron was able to isolate the same signal, just to a lower degree of precision (2.9 sigma as opposed to 5.0 sigma).
No, no, it is really the particle's mass.
http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/w0tty/higgs_boson_confirmed_at_5sigma_standard/c599ijb
Actually, we observed a new state at 125 GeV and it seems consistent with a Standard Model Higgs boson. We have NOT discovered the SM Higgs boson because we simply haven't confirmed that this new particle is the SM Higgs because we're only looking at mass itself. It could be something else with a mass of 125 GeV. To actually claim it is the SM Higgs, we need to confirm that it has spin 0, the right coupling ratios, etc. And that's what I'm working on right now. But it is very exciting because we have discovered new physics. Source: Working at CMS
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Now we just need to solve gravity, dark matter, dark energy, unify quantum chromodynamics with relativity, and a ton of other stuff.
Party's not over, folks. :)
I suspect dark matter will be easiest. Wouldn't be surprised at all if the LHC solves that one. All you need to see is what looks like a clear violation of conservation of energy/momentum at a consistant, high energy in your results, and you've got evidence that something heavy that interacts weakly or not at all with normal matter is flying off in the opposite direction. That something would probably be dark matter.
The others... that's probably going to be a long, hard slog.
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The mass of the Higgs boson is just the energy needed to make the Higgs field vibrate. The reason that the Higgs field gives particles mass is that, at its lowest energy level, the value of the Higgs field is not zero and this non-zero field then fills the universe and binds to particles giving them mass.
Hence the mass of each type of particle depends on the zero energy value (vacuum expectation value) of the Higgs field and how strongly the particle couples to it while the mass of the Higgs boson depends on how the energy density of the Higgs field changes as the strength of the field varies.
The field is everywhere, not just around us but also inside us. Everywhere and anywhere. Comparable to electromagnetic fields, except you can't shield them.
What holds the galaxy (-ies) together is something else, that's gravity. Also a field, extending to fill the universe.
The Higgs particle (or field, can't talk about one without thinking about the other) gives the universe mass (well, it's one of the things that do that) so perhaps some clever brainiacs might be able to think something up connecting the Higgs and gravity in such a way that it unites all the forces. That would be a garuanteed ticket to Stockholm and a place in history as the greatest discovery (or theory, if you like) since the discovery of fire itself.
That's shorthand, it's GeV/c^2, which is in fact a mass.
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Ok, this is going to be pretty rough, but here it goes:
The Standard Model describes all the "point particles" which can't be subdivided. Each of these particles has a few constant parameters like electric charge, color charge, mass, and spin. Electrons are one of them (-1e charge, 0.51MeV mass, spin 1/2) as are neutrinos (0 charge, some...mass, spin 1/2) and quarks (+2/3 or -1/3 charge, a few different masses, spin 1/2). Quarks come together in groups of 2 or 3 to build particles like protons and neutrons (and a whole bunch more). These are what you'd consider matter (Fermions). There are also particles that serve as "force carriers" - all the fundamental forces like electromagnetism and the nuclear forces can be thought of as exchanges of these other particles. They have integer spin, and we call them Bosons. The photon for instance represents the electric field (it's massless), the W and Z bosons represent the weak nuclear force (they have mass), and Gluons represent the strong nuclear force (they have color charge, like quarks).
The problem is that gravity isn't really mentioned anywhere in here, and unlike all the other particle parameters, "mass" seems pretty arbitrary. It's not a nice round number, so there has to be something else there behind the scenes. The solution to this is that we think there's another "field", which we call the Higgs field, and another force-carrying particle called the Higgs Boson. In the same way that particles with charge can interchange photons to "feel" the electric field, particles with mass can exchange Higgs bosons to "feel" the Higgs field. Particles that interact that way essentially tie up a bunch of energy in that reaction, and that extra bottled up energy is what we experience as mass. So the degree to which particles couple to the higgs field (you could think of it as their "mass charge" parameter) determines how much mass they have. And people way smarter than you and me have found equations that do, in fact, predict the right masses for various particles when you crunch the numbers.
The problem with finding bosons is that they're really just intermediary particles - photons are obvious enough only because they travel at the speed of light. Bosons with mass go much slower, and wind up decaying or interacting before we can directly observe them. So this find by the LHC is *indirect* evidence of the Higgs, based on how much energy they're missing from various collision interactions. But it matches the predictions to a very high degree so far, so they're calling it good.
Where does a wave on the ocean go? The "particles" are manifestation of a particle(or force) field, which is like an ocean with waves on it. These waves are called particles when they collide and collapse with something else, but are otherwise waves when they move around on the ocean. There is always some waves on the ocean but not always high enough waves to break over the sea-barrier. The sea barrier in this case is 125GeV.