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Fresh Evidence Supports Higgs Boson Discovery
An anonymous reader writes Researchers at CERN have discovered the first evidence for the direct decay of the Higgs boson into fermions, a strong indication that the particle found two years ago is the Higgs boson. From the article: "Assistant professor of physics at MIT and leader of the international effort, Markus Klute, said that his team was trying to establish if the particle that was discovered in 2012 was really consistent with the Higgs boson that was found in the Standard Model, and not one of many Higgs bosons, or an a particle that looks like it but has a different origin." Their researchers also found that the bosons also decay to fermions (fermions include all quarks and leptons) in a way that is consistent with the Standard Model Higgs. 'We have now established the main characteristics of this new particle, in its coupling to fermions and to bosons, and its spin-parity structure; all of these things are consistent with the Standard Model,' Klute says." CERN has also announced the LHC restart schedule.
In the energy range of the LHC the Higgs boson is not the only new particle that could have been discovered. You cannot automatically tag the particle a Higgs boson unless you observe and measure some of its characteristics, which is exactly what is done here, to prove it is actually a Higgs boson and not another exotic particle from another exotic theory. The Standard Model is far to be the only existing one and the LHC is also seeking for physics beyond the Standard Model. The few characteristics originally observed from the early announcement were insufficient to make certain it was a Higgs boson, that's why it was originally called a Higgs-like particle.
Achille Talon
Hop!
This is kind of like if you're walking through the woods and you discover piles of bear shit as you go. The bear shit implies there's at least one bear in the woods, but it does not preclude that there could be multiple bears responsible for it.
The Higgs field is a solution to the question of why some fundamental particles have mass. Theoretically, such a field is well-motivated. If such a field exists, it implies there is at least one massive, spin-zero particle that we have decided to call the Higgs boson. There are various extensions to our models, such as the so-called "Higgs two-doublet model" which SUSY extends, where more than one Higgs exists.