Slashdot Mirror
Researchers Find Evidence of How Higgs Particle Imparts Mass
brindafella (702231) writes Physicists at CERN's Large Hadron Colider (LHC) ATLAS experiment have been looking through their data, and have found enough of the extremely rare "W boson" (proton-proton) collisions that they can now declare their results: They have found how the Higgs imparts mass to other particles. From the article: "'Only about one in 100 trillion proton-proton collisions would produce one of these events,' said Marc-André Pleier, a physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory who played a leadership role in the analysis of this result for the ATLAS collaboration. 'You need to observe many [collisions] to see if the production rate is above or on par with predictions,' Pleier said. 'We looked through billions of proton-proton collisions produced at the LHC for a signature of these events—decay products that allow us to infer like Sherlock Holmes what happened in the event.' The analysis efforts started two years ago and were carried out in particular by groups from Brookhaven, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of Michigan, and Technische Universität Dresden, Germany."
Here's a pre-print of the paper.
The higgs particle imparts mass the same way that donut holes impart mass, but differently.
Since Einstein's famous equation relating mass and energy, physicists have always still wondered what really gives particles mass. Perhaps soon we will know a theory of mass that does not only boil down to it is a collection of energy. I for one, am hopeful that in my life time, even energy will be better understood, so that the wave particle equation can be further simplified.
Exciting times ahead for sure.
By leap I mean assumptions, not 'getting ahead'. How does one go from proving that a Higgs CAN decay into fermions, in accordance to the math of the standard model, all the way to saying that the Higgs is responsible for creating mass in general? What is the proof of any connection here? Yes, a fermion will have some mass, but how do they manage to jump to the conclusion that the Higgs creates the mass of all particles? I've looked a the paper and still don't see any connection. Looks like another overly sensational headline to me.
The Higgs field imparts mass on particles by exchanging virtual Higgs particles with them. A real Higgs particle surfaces when the field becomes excited, but you need a lot of energy for that.
http://www.phdcomics.com/comic...
Summary and title is a bit misleading. I was eager to see what they would say about how this 'higgs boson' infers mass to other particles, but they never say anything about that, they just talk about how they found this data and how they produced the results. Maybe I missed something?
Everytime the LHC makes the news ... I think congratulations to the EU and then I think about the Superconducting Super Collider being built in Texas which was cancelled in 1993. We should have had these breakthroughs come out 15 years ago. In the United States. Thanks Congress for slowing down the pace of physics. Much appreciated .. NOT.
They throw out hundreds or thousands of collisions for each datum they keep. So they have billions of events stored as data out of many trillions of mostly-boring collisions so far. This cherry-picked data may have something to do with it.
Ever notice that Cobra Commander sounds an awful lot like Star scream?
"Now finalized based on a total of 34 observed events, the measured interaction rate is in good agreement with that predicted by the Standard Model, a theory describing all known fundamental particles and their interactions."
"Now with the LHC data in hand, the measured rate agrees with the prevailing theory's predictions and establishes a signal at a significance level of 3.6 sigma—strong evidence, according to Pleier. "The probability for this measurement to be a mere background fluctuation is very small—about one in 6000," he said."
"Again, so far, the data indicate that the Higgs is working as expected.
"For the first time, we can rule out certain models or predictions that we could not before," Pleier said. "To complete the job, we need more data, at higher energy, so we can see the fingerprint more clearly."
The LHC will resume data taking at increased collision energies—13 tera-electronvolts (TeV) instead of 8 TeV—in spring of 2015. The datasets collected will be up to 150 times the size of the currently available data and will allow for a detailed behind-the-scenes look at the Higgs at work." "
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Indeed. Only a small fraction of the collision events are kept, otherwise the amount of data would be overwhelming.
From http://www.lhc-closer.es/1/3/13/0:
In particle physics, a trigger is a system that uses simple criteria to rapidly decide which events in a particle detector to keep when only a small fraction of the total can be recorded. Trigger systems are necessary due to real-world limitations in data storage capacity and rates. Since experiments are typically searching for "interesting" events (such as decays of rare particles) that occur at a relatively low rate, trigger systems are used to identify the events that should be recorded for later analysis. Current accelerators have event rates greater than 1 MHz and trigger rates that can be below 10 Hz.
"Researchers Find Evidence of How Higgs Particle Imparts Mass "
Ummm, no. This paper is about an unrelated bit of physics, W-W scattering. It is orthogonal to the Higgs mechanism.
Reading over the article I don't see any confusion on this point, so I'm looking at the author here on /.