"But if this was proved correct, it would make the LHC even more exciting. One hypothesis is that an elusive particle called the Higgs boson is responsible for giving all other particles their mass. "In our interpretation," study co-author Martin said, "these Higgses cannot be too heavy, so we should definitely see them during the LHC era."ĭavid Evans, a physicist at the University of Birmingham and the head of the LHC’s ALICE project, added by email, "I personally think it is unlikely that we have five different Higgs particles. If Martin's team is correct and the Higgs boson is actually five different particles, then it should be detectable by the LHC in Switzerland. "It's important not to jump up and down too soon about this." "I know of nothing to make me explicitly doubt the result, but when something is so unexpected and yet so subtle it bears taking time and taking a deep breath," Quigg said. Though "quite provocative," the results are still preliminary, Quigg stressed. "A lot of the schemes for extending the standard model include as a first step adding ," Martin said.Ĭhris Quigg is a theoretical physicist, also at Fermilab, but he was not involved in the study. (See also "Large Hadron Collider to Have 'Practical' Spin-Offs?") The theory states that this field was produced immediately after the Big Bang, long before atoms were ever thought of. The Higgs field, in contrast to other forces, has no preferred direction and is consistent even when reflected. If multiple Higgs bosons exist, they may interact with matter differently, which could in turn lead to new kinds of undiscovered physics beyond the standard model, scientists say. The Higgs boson is the first and only scalar particle among the basic forces of existence. Multiple God Particles "Quite Provocative" "These new interactions can even treat matter and antimatter differently and therefore lead to bigger effects in experiments." "When we extend the standard model, we put in new particles and new interactions," said Martin, whose results were published recently on the physics-research website. The DZero results can, however, be explained if scientists assume the Higgs boson is actually five particles-an extension of the standard model called the two-Higgs doublet model. "The standard model with just the one Higgs particle is too minimal to explain the DZero result." "It's a really small effect, but it's still much bigger than if you turn all the cranks with all the original rules in the standard model," Martin said. The difference was tiny-less than one percent-but it can't be explained by a standard model that assumes the existence of a single Higgs boson, said study co-author Adam Martin, a theoretical physicist at Fermilab. In an experiment called DZero at the lab's Tevatron particle collider, scientists recently found that collisions of protons and antiprotons produced pairs of matter particles more often than pairs of antimatter particles. Now, researchers at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, say they have found more evidence for this multiple-particle theory. It's also one of the targets of experiments by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which began smashing subatomic particles together at half its maximum power in March.Īccording to the widely accepted standard model of physics, all particles acquire their mass by interacting with the Higgs boson.īut some theories say that the Higgs boson is not one, but multiple, particles with similar masses but different electrical charges. WHAT IS THE HIGGS BOSONTHE GOD PARTICLE The Fourth of July 2012 was more than a United States National holiday. You don't really get that from "God Particle." You do, however, get a hilarious joke about Catholic Mass and mass from the Higgs boson that Neil deGrasse Tyson told us - which is about as close to religion as the particle gets.The "God particle" may actually be five distinct particles, evidence from a new atom-smashing experiment suggests.Ĭalled the Higgs boson, the theoretical particle has been long sought by physicists who think it's responsible for all mass in the universe-hence the name God particle. The particle is associated with the Higgs field that physicists think permeates all of space-time and helps give other particles their mass. In addition to the irrelevant tie to religion, the nickname doesn't do anything to help explain what the Higgs boson actually does. "I am not particularly religious, but I find the term an 'in your face' affront to those who ," Vivek Sharma, a physicist at the University of California, San Diego, told Live Science back when the Higgs was discovered. Unfortunately the publisher's version of the nickname stuck, and physicists are not happy about it. However, his publishers weren't exactly on board with that phrasing, so the title was changed to " The God Particle." "The Goddamn Particle" was suppose to be the title of Lederman's book that came out in the 1990s and was wildly popular for a book about physics.
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