Data hint at key hypothetical particle for mass in the universe

by deipokfo0 on 2012-03-08 15:06:14

It has led to a joke now in the physics circle: the Higgs boson has never been discovered, but its mass is 1250 billion electron volts. The Atlas and CMS groups will try to combine and coordinate their data in the next few weeks. The Hadron Collider, which is now on winter vacation, will start again in April with proton collisions at a displacement of four trillion electron volts. CERN says the collider will gather enough data to determine whether the Higgs boson exists or not this year, forever changing the game. "Based on the current Tevatron data and results compiled up to November 2011 from other experiments, this is the strongest indication of the existence of the Higgs boson," the report said, which will be presented at a physics conference held by Wade Fisher of Michigan State University in Los Angeles Thuile, Italy.

The signal, collected from data over the past few years within the Tevatron Fermi Accelerator, roughly agrees with the results published in December last year by two independent working experimental groups at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, located just outside Geneva. All these results, individually or collectively, are strong enough to give scientists confidence. But the latest report encourages them to think that the elusive particle, key to the mass and diversity in the universe, may be seen soon, perhaps even by this summer.

Newly appointed Professor Beate at the University of California, Berkeley has been deeply involved in analyzing the data from the Large Hadron Collider and commented on the recent CERN results, "It smells like the Higgs boson." However, she noted that the signal might also disappear when more data becomes available.

The Higgs boson is the key block in the equation suite of the Standard Model, an ambitious set of rules governing high-energy physics in the universe over the past few decades, explaining how three of the four basic natural forces work. But the boson itself has never been observed. This theory describes how the behavior works, but cannot predict a key property, its mass.

After 40 years, more evidence was reported on Wednesday, and the largest chase in the history of physics may finally be coming to an end. Scientists at Fermilab have come down with what they call a sickness. They say they have found a bump in their data that could be intrinsic to the Higgs boson, a hypothetical particle responsible for giving other fundamental particles their mass.

In December last year, two groups conducting the enormous particle detectors named CMS and ATLAS from the particle collider reported that they found promising bumps in their data around 1240 billion electron volts and 1260 billion electron volts respectively, units favored by particle physicists for mass or energy. (By comparison, a proton is about one billion electron volts, approximately one million times that of an electron.)

Physicists at Fermilab have found a broad hump in their data in the same region, between 1150 billion and 1350 billion electron volts. These results come from combining the data of two detectors operating on the Tevatron: the Fermilab Collider Detector and DZero. The chance that this signal is the result of random fluctuations in the data is only 1 in 100, the group said. Denisov, leader of Fermilab's efforts, issued a warning, writing in an email to Los Angeles Thuile, "It is clearly not the answer, but an important piece of the puzzle!" Rumors suggest that the Higgs boson has eluded both CERN and Fermilab in the past few years, but always one group would see a lump, another would see a dip in the data, and the multiple data rough spots would go away. This is the first time in the long search for the particle that different groups, indeed different colliders, have reached a vague agreement.

Any of the above results, physicists say, would be very exciting. If the Higgs particle does not exist, they must figure out a new way the universe operates. If they truly discover the Higgs particle, studying the clues it provides might lead them to deeper mysteries that the Standard Model cannot solve. The Tevatron, which has been the world's most powerful accelerator for 20 years, shut down last September.