Higgs Boson Signals Gain Strength at Large Hadron
Collider
February 7, 2012 by Range
In December, it was announced that the two main
experiments at the Large
Hadron Collider (LHC),
which is still the world’s largest and highest-energy particle
accelerator, had possibly ferreted out the inscrutable Higgs
boson. Today, the experiments at the
LHC submitted the results of their analyses.
The analyses don’t contain any new data,
naturally since the LHC stopped colliding protons back in
November, and these results are just rehashes of the earlier
runs.
The Higgs is as of yet a hypothetical elementary
particle, which is supposed to exist according to the Standard
Model of
particle physics. The Higgs field is a hypothetical, ubiquitous
quantum field that actually has a non-zero value in its ground
state, which explains why fundamental particles, such as quarks
and electrons, have mass.
For the Compact Muon Solenoid, particle
physicists have been able to look at another kind of possible
decay from the Higgs, which allowed them to boost their Higgs
signal from 2.5σ to 3.1σ. Together with data from the other
detector, ATLAS, overall Higgs signal strength is at 4.3σ.
According to statistics, there’s a 99.996% chance that this
signal is right and that it belongs to the Higgs.
Even though this sounds very convincing, it’s
certainly not a confirmed fact, as of yet. The LHC will start
firing once again this spring, and then physicists will be able
to get closer to the observable truth. For now, scientists are
meeting in Chamonix, France, to discuss at what power the LHC
will run at this year. The latest rumors indicate that they will
push the machine from 7 to 8 TeV, which will also increase its
luminosity.
[via Nature,
images by Wikipedia]
Source: Science
Technology Daily
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