Confirmed! Newfound Particle Is the Higgs

[Buster's Uncle]

Confirmed! Newfound Particle Is the Higgs
By Jeanna Bryner, LiveScience Managing Editor | LiveScience.com – 3 hrs ago.. .

 
A newfound particle discovered at the world's largest atom smasher last year is, indeed, the Higgs boson, the particle thought to explain how other particles get their mass, scientists reported today (March 14) at the annual Rencontres de Moriond conference in Italy.
 
Physicists announced on July 4, 2012, that, with more than 99 percent certainty, they had found a new elementary particle weighing about 126 times the mass of the proton that was likely the long-sought Higgs boson. The Higgs is sometimes referred to as the "God particle," to the chagrin of many scientists, who prefer its official name.
 
But the two experiments, CMS and ATLAS, hadn't collected enough data to say the particle was, for sure, the Higgs boson, the last undiscovered piece of the puzzle predicted by the Standard Model, the reigning theory of particle physics.
 
Now, after collecting two and a half times more data inside the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — where protons zip at near light-speed around the 17-mile-long (27 kilometer) underground ring beneath Switzerland and France — physicists say the particle is the Higgs. [In Photos: Searching for the Higgs Boson]
 


"The preliminary results with the full 2012 data set are magnificent and to me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson though we still have a long way to go to know what kind of Higgs boson it is," said CMS spokesperson Joe Incandela in a statement.
 
Dave Charlton, ATLAS spokesperson agreed, the new results "point to the new particle having the spin-parity of a Higgs boson as in the Standard Model," referring to a quantum property of elementary particles.
 
To confirm the particle as the Higgs boson, physicists needed to collect tons of data that would reveal its quantum properties as well as how it interacted with other particles. For instance, a Higgs particle should have no spin and its parity, or the measure of how its mirror image behaves, should be positive, both of which were supported by data from the ATLAS and CMS experiments.
 
Even so, the scientists are not sure whether this Higgs boson is the one predicted by the Standard Model or perhaps the lightest of several bosons predicted to exist by other theories.
 
Seeing how this particle decays into other particles could let physicists know whether this Higgs is the "plain vanilla" Standard Model Higgs. Detecting a Higgs boson is rare, with just one observed for every 1 trillion proton-proton collisions. As such, the LHC physicists say they need much more data to understand all of the ways in which the Higgs decays.
 
From what is known about the particle now, physicists have said the Higgs boson may spell the universe's doom in the very far future. That's because the mass of the Higgs boson is a critical part of a calculation that portends the future of space and time. Its mass of 126 times the mass of the proton is just about what would be needed to create a fundamentally unstable universe that would lead to a cataclysm billions of years from now.
 
"This calculation tells you that many tens of billions of years from now there'll be a catastrophe," Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., said last month at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
 
"It may be the universe we live in is inherently unstable, and at some point billions of years from now it's all going to get wiped out," added Lykken, a collaborator on the CMS experiment.

http://news.yahoo.com/confirmed-newfound-particle-higgs-130317830.html

[Buster's Uncle]

6 Implications of Finding a Higgs Boson Particle
By Clara Moskowitz, LiveScience Senior Writer | LiveScience.com – 14 mins ago.. .

 
Physicists announced today (March 14) that a particle discovered at the world's largest atom smasher last year is a Higgs boson, a long-sought particle thought to explain how other particles get their mass.
 
Discovered at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), where protons zip at near light-speed around a 17-mile-long (27 kilometers) underground ring beneath Switzerland and France, the Higgs boson particle is the last undiscovered piece of the puzzle predicted by the Standard Model, the reigning theory of particle physics.
 
Confirming a Higgs boson, physicists say, will have wide-reaching implications. Here are six of the biggest consequences:
 
1. The origin of mass
 
The Higgs boson has long been thought the key to resolving the mystery of the origin of mass. The Higgs boson is associated with a field, called the Higgs field, theorized to pervade the universe. As other particles travel though this field, they acquire mass much as swimmers moving through a pool get wet, the thinking goes.
 
"The Higgs mechanism is the thing that allows us to understand how the particles acquire mass," said Joao Guimaraes da Costa, a physicist at Harvard University who is the Standard Model Convener at the LHC's ATLAS experiment, last year when the discovery was announced. "If there was no such mechanism, then everything would be massless."
 
Confirming the particle is a Higgs would also confirm that the Higgs mechanism for particles to acquire mass is correct. "This discovery bears on the knowledge of how mass comes about at the quantum level, and is the reason we built the LHC. It is an unparalleled achievement," Caltech professor of physics Maria Spiropulu, co-leader of the CMS experiment, said in a statement last year. [Gallery: Search for the Higgs Boson]

 And, it may offer clues to the next mystery down the line, which is why individual particles have the masses that they do. "That could be part of a much larger theory," said Harvard University particle physicist Lisa Randall. "Knowing what the Higgs boson is, is the first step of knowing a little more about what that theory could be. It's connected."
 
2. The Standard Model
 
The Standard Model is the reigning theory of particle physics that describes the universe's very small constituents. Every particle predicted by the Standard Model has been discovered — except one: the Higgs boson.
 
"It's the missing piece in the Standard Model," Jonas Strandberg, a researcher at CERN working on the ATLAS experiment, said last year of the particle announcement. "So it would definitely be a confirmation that the theories we have now are right."
 
So far, the Higgs boson seems to match up with predictions made by the Standard Model. Even so, the Standard Model itself isn't thought to be complete. It doesn't encompass gravity, for example, and leaves out the dark matter thought to make up 98 percent of all matter in the universe. [6 Weird Facts About Gravity]
 
"Clear evidence that the new particle is the Standard Model Higgs boson still would not complete our understanding of the universe," Patty McBride, head of the CMS Center at Fermilab, said today (March 14) in a statement. "We still wouldn't understand why gravity is so weak and we would have the mysteries of dark matter to confront. But it is satisfying to come a step closer to validating a 48-year-old theory."
 
3. The electroweak force
 
The confirmation of the Higgs also helps to explain how two of the fundamental forces of the universe — the electromagnetic force that governs interactions between charged particles, and the weak force that's responsible for radioactive decay — can be unified. [9 Unsolved Physics Mysteries]
 
Every force in nature is associated with a particle. The particle tied to electromagnetism is the photon, a tiny, massless particle. The weak force is associated with particles called the W and Z bosons, which are very massive.
 
The Higgs mechanism is thought to be responsible for this.
 
"If you introduce the Higgs field, the W and Z bosons mix with the field, and through this mixing they acquire mass," Strandberg said. "This explains why the W and Z bosons have mass, and also unifies the electromagnetic and weak forces into the electroweak force."
 
Though other evidence has helped buffer the union of these two forces, the Higgs discovery may seal the deal.
 
4. Supersymmetry
 
The theory supersymmetry is also affected by the Higgs discovery. This idea posits that every known particle has a "superpartner" particle with slightly different characteristics.
 
Supersymmetry is attractive because it could help unify some of the other forces of nature, and even offers a candidate for the particle that makes up dark matter. So far, though, scientists have found indications of only a Standard Model Higgs boson, without any strong hints of supersymmetric particles.
 
5. Validation of LHC
 
The Large Hadron Collider is the world's largest particle accelerator. It was built for around $10 billion by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) to probe higher energies than had ever been reached on Earth. Finding the Higgs boson was touted as one of the machine's biggest goals.
 
The newly announced finding offers major validation for the LHC and for the scientists who've worked on the search for many years.
 
"This discovery bears on the knowledge of how mass comes about at the quantum level, and is the reason we built the LHC. It is an unparalleled achievement," Spiropulu said in a statement last year. "More than a generation of scientists has been waiting for this very moment and particle physicists, engineers, and technicians in universities and laboratories around the globe have been working for many decades to arrive at this crucial fork. This is the pivotal moment for us to pause and reflect on the gravity of the discovery, as well as a moment of tremendous intensity to continue the data collection and analyses."
 
The discovery of the Higgs also has major implications for scientist Peter Higgs and his colleagues who first proposed the Higgs mechanism in 1964. The finding also shines a symbolic light on the boson's namesake, the late Indian physicist and mathematician Satyendranath Bose, who along with Albert Einstein, helped to define bosons. A class of elementary particles, bosons (which include gluons and gravitons) mediate interactions between fermions (including quarks, electrons and neutrinos), the other group of fundamental building blocks of the universe.
 
6. Is the universe doomed?
 
The Higgs boson discovery opens the door to new calculations that weren't previously possible, scientists say, including one that suggests the universe is in for a cataclysm billions of years from now.
 
The mass of the Higgs boson is a critical part of a calculation that portends the future of space and time. At around 126 times the mass of the proton, the Higgs is just about what would be needed to create a fundamentally unstable universe that would lead to a cataclysm billions of years from now.
 
"This calculation tells you that many tens of billions of years from now there'll be a catastrophe," Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., said last month at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
 
"It may be the universe we live in is inherently unstable, and at some point billions of years from now it's all going to get wiped out," added Lykken, a collaborator on the CMS experiment.

http://news.yahoo.com/6-implications-finding-higgs-boson-particle-165320240.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Life After Higgs: What's Next for World's Largest Atom Smasher?
By Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Senior Writer | LiveScience.com – 14 hrs ago.. .

 
Less than five years after it went live, the Large Hadron Collider has confirmed the existence of a Higgs boson, the particle which may explain how other particles get their mass.
 
The confirmation comes today (March 14), after a July 2012 announcement of the elementary particle's discovery. At the time, researchers strongly suspected they'd found a Higgs, but needed to collect more data. Since then, they've more than doubled the amount of data they have on the particle using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 17-mille-long (27 kilometers) underground ring on the French-Swiss border where protons zing around at near the speed of light.
 
With a Higgs boson discovered, what more is there for this enormous and unusual piece of machinery to do? Lots, according to physicists.
 
For one thing, scientists are still working out whether the Higgs boson they've discovered fits the Standard Model of physics or if it better fits another theory. (So far, the Standard Model appears to be the winning candidate.)
 
And the hunt for the Higgs boson is just one of the ongoing projects at the particle accelerator. Other projects have such humble goals as explaining dark matter, revealing the symmetries of the universe and even looking for new dimensions of space, according to the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. [5 Reasons We May Live in a Multiverse]
 
"It really is a machine that's capable of going to higher energies, maybe ultimately to a factor of seven times higher energy," said Peter Woit, a physicist at Columbia University. "Which means going to distances seven times smaller and basically looking for anything you can find."
 
Here are the major projects ongoing at the LHC:
 
ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment @ CERN): By smashing particles together, scientists can recreate the first few milliseconds after the Big Bang, illuminating the early history of the universe. A detector 52 feet (16 meters) high and 85 feet (261 m) long enables scientists to study what's known as quark-gluon plasma. The researchers collide heavy ions, liberating their quarks and gluons (quarks are the constituent part of protons, which are held together by gluons). It takes a machine like the LHC to separate these atomic particles and study them individually.
 
ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus): This is the experiment that observed a Higgs in July. But ATLAS's work isn't done. The LHC, and the ATLAS detector, are currently in shutdown mode, preparing for an energy increase. When LHC starts up again after 2013, the atom smasher will be able to fling protons at each other at 14 teraelectronvolts (TeV), double its previous 7 TeV.
 
ATLAS has a broad mission. It's a tool that can search for extra dimensions of space and supersymmetry, the idea that every known particle has a "superpartner particle," an important component of string theory. Supersymmetry would, in turn, help elucidate dark energy, which may exist in the vacuum of space and be responsible for the acceleration of the universe's expansion. ATLAS is also part of the search for dark matter, a mysterious form of matter that may make up more than 95 percent of the universe's total matter density, but which is virtually unknown. [Whoa! The Coolest Little Particles in Nature]
 
CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid): Like ATLAS, CMS is a jack-of-all trades. The detector is meant to explore the same questions about the origins of the universe and the fundamentals of matter.
 
LHCb (Large Hadron Collider beauty): The LHCb project studies how B mesons decay. Mesons are particles made of a quark and an antiquark bound together; a B meson contains a flavor of quark known as the "b-quark." Studying this decay helps scientists understand imbalances between antimatter and matter. During the Big Bang, matter and antimatter should have been created in equal amounts, leading physics theories suggest. Even so, the world is made up nearly entirely of matter, so the mystery remains: What happened to the antimatter?
 
The LHCb will also study the decay products of the Higgs boson particle.
 
LHCf (Large Hadron Collider forward): This project is just spacey. The LHCf is focused on the physics of cosmic rays, charged particles that flow through space. Ultra-high-energy cosmic rays remain a mystery to physicists, who hope to find out their origins with the help of the LHCf experiment, which is a joint collaboration with the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina and the Telescope Array in Utah.
 
TOTEM (Total Cross Section, Elastic Scattering and Diffraction Dissociation): The TOTEM detector is small by LHC standards, involving only about 100 scientists (projects such as ATLAS have thousands). The goal is to measure how particles scatter at small angles from proton-proton collisions in the LHC. Collisions studied by TOTEM include those where one proton or both protons survive the crash, enabling scientists to calculate the likelihood of a collision destroying both protons. Those numbers, in turn, tell researchers the probability of producing particular particles in a collision.
 
One thread connecting all experiments at the Large Hadron Collider is the hope that something new and unexpected will arise.
 
"There's certainly a long history in physics where you get the ability to look at things at much smaller and smaller scales, you see something you didn't expect," Woit told LiveScience. "They're hoping the LHC would find something that we hadn't thought of. And that hasn’t happened yet, and maybe it never will."

http://news.yahoo.com/life-higgs-whats-next-worlds-largest-atom-smasher-212445325.html

[Lord Avalon]

"God does not play dice."

- Albert Einstein, Datalinks