Friday, October 2, 2015

So, the Higgs boson might not have been discovered after all - TIME



  • A year after Peter Higgs and Francois Englert were handed the Nobel Prize for their work in helping discover the Higgs Boson, a group of scientists have claimed the so-called God particle may not have been found after all.
    A team of Danish researchers said that while particle physicists at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) Large Hadron Collider definitely found something, it could have been another particle entirely.
    “The current data is not precise enough to determine exactly what the particle is,” said Mads Toudal Frandsen of the University of Southern Denmark’s Centre for Cosmology and Particle Physics Phenomenology, publishing the team’s findings in the Physical Review D journal.
    “It could be a number of other known particles.”
    Rather than the Higgs boson - the building block in the Standard Model of the fundamental forces of physics and the creation of the universe - the Danish-based team believe that another theoretical particle called the techni-higgs could have been discovered.
    Techni-higgs is not elementary but made up of techni-quarks, which in turn could form in some combinations dark matter, which makes up most of the matter in the universe but that the Higgs boson cannot explain.
    The Large Hadron Collider was shut down for maintenance in early 2013 and will not start smashing protons together again until next year.