God Particle Found
By tony leather, 22nd Jun 2012 | Follow this author
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Posted in WikinutNewsScience
The so-called God particle, aka the Higgs boson - represents the missing element of the Standard Model, a late 20th century framework describing interactions between all known subatomic particles and forces
God Particle Found
Over many years now, Physicists have been using the Large Hadron Collider - LHC - to locate the elusive particle, and now the search might finally be over, as rumours are rife which suggest that it has at last been been found - an announcement could be made between July 4th and July 11th at the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Australia.
There were hints last December at the LHC, but further energetic collision experiments have now made the bottom line clear, because it appears that something has been found looking like the elusive particle is thought , according to a blog written by mathematician Peter Woit on his blog.
This strong rumour is the latest in the long drama attached to the search drama. December speculation hinted at these particles being around 125 times the mass of a proton though the hard data only amounted to a 0.13% probability, the level at evidence for the existence of a particle is claimed - a so-called 3-sigma signal
5-sigma signals - a 0.000028% probability of chance happening - are needed to claim a real discovery, and the newest rumours have it that previously unseen 4-sigma signals are turning up at both LHC experiments currently hunting the particle, and if both experiments are seeing 4-sigma signals, then the likelihood is that the long-sought particle has finally showed up, the two 4-sigma results combined theoretically enough to clear that 5-sigma hurdle, though it is certain that these rumoured results could disappear with further scrutiny.
The so-called God particle, aka the Higgs boson - represents the missing element of the Standard Model, a late 20th century framework describing interactions between all known subatomic particles and forces. In fact, the Standard Model holds lots of different ones, like quarks and W bosons, all discovered by the LHC in the past 40 years.
That this elusive god particle is critical to the Standard Model becomes more obvious when you consider that the interaction between Higgs and all the others is what gives all of them their mass, so failing to find it would limit current scientific understanding of universal history and forces.
Discovering this holy grail of physics would be remarkable indeed, especially if the Higgs boson has somewhat different properties than theory predicts, as such deviations could well suggest the existence of previously unknown physics that push beyond the Standard Model - such as so-called supersymmetry, which supposes an even heavier, as yet unknown partner to all known particles, that might dramatically alter human perception of physics altogether.
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