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Higgs Boson Discovered?!

Darat said:
It is hardly surprising that the scientists haven't found the Higgs boson, isn't it meant to be something to do with gravity? Yet they try to detect it in a vacuum!
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Gravity can't be worked-around very easily.
It gets everything all the time, especially in a lab, even a lab on the ISS.
 
Already I am concerned that the Higgs Boson announcement will lead to a rush of "fat jokes," if it hasn't done so already. Get ready for wit like this:

"Scientists say that the Higgs Boson is the particle that gives a body its weight. Looks like Chris Christie has discovered a whole bunch of Higgs Bosons already!"
 
So its mass is 100 times the mass of a proton, but it doesn't interact with normal matter.

So the Higgs is dark matter, right? The dark matter question has been answered.
 
Puppycow said:
So its mass is 100 times the mass of a proton, but it doesn't interact with normal matter.

So the Higgs is dark matter, right? The dark matter question has been answered.
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No. Dark matter needs to be stable. A stable Higgs wouldn't decay into detectable channels.
 
quarky said:
I suppose there will be a Satan particle as well?
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From what I've read the super-symmetry experiment is coming up empty, so apparently not. Super-symmetric particles (sparticles?) are apparently proving obvious by their absence.

Of course the super-symmetry squad may be terminally compromised by Satanist infiltration, it's not for me to say. It could be down to something as simple as the god particle having better hair.
 
edd said:
No. Dark matter needs to be stable. A stable Higgs wouldn't decay into detectable channels.
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How stable though? Is a half-life of a trillion years stable enough to account for dark matter but still detectable (barely).

ETA: It seems to me like, to make an analogy, that there's a big part of the jigsaw puzzle of physics that has been missing its piece, and now we've found a piece that looks like it's the right size and shape, and it just remains to put the piece into the puzzle and see if it fits well enough.
 
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Puppycow said:
How stable though? Is a half-life of a trillion years stable enough to account for dark matter but still detectable (barely).

ETA: It seems to me like, to make an analogy, that there's a big part of the jigsaw puzzle of physics that has been missing its piece, and now we've found a piece that looks like it's the right size and shape, and it just remains to put the piece into the puzzle and see if it fits well enough.
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:confused: Why do you mention a hypothetical half life many times the age of the universe and the piece we found that looks the right size and shape, which means amongst other things a halflife measured in the tiniest fractions of seconds, like you're talking about the same particle?
 
MattusMaximus said:
Despite the fact that I hate the headline ("God particle" :rolleyes: ) I am very, very interested to see what this is all about. Looks like a big announcement coming on Wednesday...

Anyone here got an inside scoop on this? :popcorn1
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Great!, I've got something to blame next time I gain weight
 
Dragoonster said:
Who was that idiot physicist who coined the term? If he ever won a Nobel he should now be stripped of it.
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mike3 said:
Apparently, this guy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Lederman

And yes, he won a Nobel.
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a_unique_person said:
From what I have read, it was originally called the 'goddam' particle, but it wasn't seen to be a polite way to refer to it. Hence the slight change.
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Lederman appears to have coined both terms.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_God_Particle_(book)

Lederman said he gave the Higgs boson the nickname "The God Particle" because the particle is "so central to the state of physics today, so crucial to our final understanding of the structure of matter, yet so elusive,"[5][6][7] but jokingly added that a second reason was because "the publisher wouldn't let us call it the Goddamn Particle, though that might be a more appropriate title, given its villainous nature and the expense it is causing."[8][9]
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Turgor said:
:confused: Why do you mention a hypothetical half life many times the age of the universe and the piece we found that looks the right size and shape, which means amongst other things a halflife measured in the tiniest fractions of seconds, like you're talking about the same particle?
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Sorry. Perhaps I've misunderstood what this thing is. I'm only a layman.

So, the Higgs boson only exists for a fraction of a second before decomposing?

ETA: I looked it up. Sorry, never mind.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson

Like other massive particles (e.g. the top quark and W and Z bosons), Higgs bosons created in particle accelerators decay long before they reach any of the detectors. However, the Standard Model precisely predicts the possible modes of decay and their probabilities. This allows events in which a Higgs was created to be identified by examining the decay products.
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ETA2: But if the Higgs boson is that last particle of the standard model and it doesn't account for dark matter, then dark matter must be something outside the standard model, right?
 
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Puppycow said:
How stable though? Is a half-life of a trillion years stable enough to account for dark matter but still detectable (barely).
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The Higgs boson is an unstable (something like 10^-25 seconds) particle whose interactions are, in the context of the Standard Model, 100% known.

Dark matter is thought to be some sort of stable or nearly-stable particle---more than a trillion years, i.e. 10^+20 seconds, is probably the right ballpark. It's not described in the Standard Model. We have a forest of hypotheses about what interactions it might have, but no idea if any of these hypotheses are true.

ETA: It seems to me like, to make an analogy, that there's a big part of the jigsaw puzzle of physics that has been missing its piece, and now we've found a piece that looks like it's the right size and shape, and it just remains to put the piece into the puzzle and see if it fits well enough.
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That's not a bad analogy. The Standard Model tells us to expect a heavyish, spin-1 particle, which couples to mass, which is produced in thus-and-such collisions, which decays to heavy particles and occasionally photons, etc.. We go to LHC and (if the rumors are true) we've seen a heavy particle, we've seen it produced in the expected ballpark, we've seen two of its decay options. It seems like a likely fit for the known "Higgs" hole in the Standard Model ... but we haven't yet placed it securely in that hole. One extra bump or divot could mean a mis-fit.
 
Damn - I was hoping that it wasn't found - because it's getting rather boring these days in physics what with the world behaving as we thought it did! :)
 
I see that they are still waiting on the results from Atlas, I expect the results from Atlas will be really, really big and really, really impressive and have great hair.
 
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