"Higgs" boson may not open door to exotic realms

[n2doc]

By Robert EvansPosted 2012/11/15 at 4:10 pm EST

GENEVA, Nov. 15, 2012 (Reuters) — A new elementary particle whose discovery was announced with fanfare to a waiting world in July may be just a little less exciting than scientists had hoped.

Reporting on a conference in Kyoto where the latest data from their Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was presented, scientists at the CERN European research center said on Thursday it seemed very likely that the particle was indeed the long-sought Higgs boson, which gives mass to matter.

But rather than an exotic beast opening the door to new realms of cosmology as some had hoped, the data increasingly suggests it is a "Standard Model Higgs" fitting into the current scientific concept of the universe, they asserted.

"It is still too early to tell, but the new particle looks like, sings like, and dances more and more like a Higgs boson," said Pauline Gagnon, a physicist on the LHC Atlas experiment, one of three which analyse the data.

Oliver Buchmueller, of the rival but parallel CMS experiment, told Reuters "the evidence for it being the Higgs gets stronger and stronger as we go along."

But there was still no sign of it being more unusual than originally predicted.

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http://www.newsdaily.com/stories/bre8ae1ri-us-higgs/

[longship]

1. Amazing! The "Standard Model" stands yet.

Damn! It would have been very cool to see the theory break, especially in a bizarre way.

It is astounding that the three decade old Standard Model has survived every damned thing that the experimentalists can throw at it. One might think that the theoreticians would be happy about this. But other than Peter Higgs and a couple others who will likely earn a Nobel Prize, to the rest of the physics community this means that there is no new experimental data that points to characteristics of a new theory beyond the Standard Model. Without that, the theoreticians are basically blind.

Nota bene: another indication in the LHC runs is that SUSY (super symmetry) is likely not a deal. So, the string guys are not at all happy about that.

We might have to wait for full power to get something new and cool.