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CERN May Not Have Discovered Higgs Boson After All
An anonymous reader writes Physicists Peter Higgs and Francois Englert won the Nobel Prize for discovering the Higgs Boson, but some scientists believe that the particle may not have been discovered yet at all. A new study by a group of scientists from the University of Southern Denmark raises the possibility that the data collected from the Large Hadron Collider could instead explain another type of subatomic particle. Mads Toudal Frandsen, a particle physicist, explained in a statement, "The CERN data is generally taken as evidence that the particular particle is the Higgs particle ... It is true that the Higgs particle can explain the data but there can be other explanations, we would also get this data from other particles."
Color charge in physics was named because it behaves abstractly like the addition of primary colors, and that made a decent analogy for the description. Technicolor is the name of a theory that extends the Standard model with some stuff that originally was similar to the color charge, so the name reflects that. The theory does a nice job of wrapping up some loose ends from the Standard model, and doesn't require fine-tuning. But like most extensions to the Standard model, it will be a while before alternative theories are confirmed or strongly eliminated because the most obvious results of models extending to high energies require particle accelerators large than what we have.
Technicolour models have been around for ages and this does not seem to be anything significantly new. Indeed it is no different from Supersymmetry which also has a Standard Model-like Higgs boson...plus another 4 on top two of which are electrically charged. SUSY can also explain Dark Matter if the lightest SUSY particle is stable and has far better theoretical motivation than techni-colour models.
While this does not make it any more likely to be correct I really hope techni-colour is not how the universe works. Having a smaller scale for the fundamental particles will push the energy of any new physics likely to solve the fundamental questions we have far higher and probably beyond the reach of current accelerator technology.