| Drone |
Dec 14, 2011 07:37 AM |
December 13, 2011
Quote:
Two experiments at the LHC have nearly eliminated the space in which the Higgs boson could dwell, scientists announced in a seminar held at CERN today.
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http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-12-...-particle.html
They didn't find Higgs but they managed to narrow down the possible range and got some hints!
Quote:
Theorists have predicted that some subatomic particles gain mass by interacting with other particles called Higgs bosons. The Higgs boson is the only undiscovered part of the Standard Model of physics, which describes the basic building blocks of matter and their interactions.
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So here's what they found:
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The experiments' main conclusion is that the Standard Model Higgs boson, if it exists, is most likely to have a mass constrained to the range 116-130 GeV by the ATLAS experiment, and 115-127 GeV by CMS.
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I take a wild guess and think it's gotta be 125 or 126 Gev :p
Higgs boson "dies" pretty fast so it's just another hide n seek game
Quote:
Higgs bosons, if they exist, are short-lived and can decay in many different ways. Just as a vending machine might return the same amount of change using different combinations of coins, the Higgs can decay into different combinations of particles.
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In this case it's better to take a blackbox approach, if you can't directly observe it then try to analyze the output results
Quote:
Discovery relies on observing statistically significant excesses of the particles into which they (Higgs bosons) decay rather than observing the Higgs itself.
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It's far too early to say whether ATLAS and CMS have discovered the Higgs boson, but these updated results are generating a lot of interest. We'll have to wait until 2013-2014 to get more news, maybe by that time LHC will work with much higher energies.
Quote:
Another possibility, discovering the absence of a Standard Model Higgs, would point to new physics at the LHC's full design energy, set to be achieved after 2014. Whether ATLAS and CMS show over the coming months that the Standard Model Higgs boson exists or not, the LHC program is closing in on new discoveries.
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Yes, that's it: whatever they'll find will lead us to new physics. How knows maybe we'll even have a reason to believe in extra dimensions :) Keep on searching!
The mass of neutrinos and existence of Higgs boson (and Higgs field) will shed some light on everything: creation of universe and all other important questions. Why do we exist, is our universe actually 10D and so on. Here's my other post about Higgs boson from other thread :
http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/sh...6&postcount=43
Some extra links and info which you can read if you don't know or want to know more about Higgs Boson and Standard Model :
http://www.exploratorium.edu/origins...eas/higgs.html
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/9...ant-to-science
Wiki links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_mechanism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Higgs
Here's Factfile on LHC
Quote:
-- The LHC comprises four huge labs interspersed around a ring-shaped tunnel located near Geneva, 27 km (16.9 miles) long and up to 175 m (568 feet) below ground.
-- Beams of hydrogen protons are accelerated in opposed directions to more than 99.9999% of the speed of light. Powerful superconducting magnets, chilled to a temperature colder than deep space, then "bend" the beams so that streams of particles collide within four large chambers.
- The smashups fleetingly generate temperatures 100,000 times hotter than the Sun, replicating the conditions that prevailed just after the "Big Bang" that created the Universe 13.7 billion years ago.
- Swathing the chambers are detectors that give a 3-D image of the traces of sub-atomic particles hurled out from the protons' destruction. These traces are then closely analysed in the search for movements, properties or novel particles that could advance our understanding of matter.
-- In top gear, the LHC is designed to generate nearly a billion collisions per second. Above ground, a farm of 3,000 computers, one of the largest in the world, instantly crunches the number down to about 100 collisions that are of the most interest.
-- Peak LHC collisions generate 14 teraelectron volts (TeV), amounting to a high concentration of energy but only at an extraordinarily tiny scale. One TeV is the equivalent energy of motion of a flying mosquito. There is no safety risk, says CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research).
- Other LHC's investigations include supersymmetry -- the idea that more massive particles exists beyond those in the Standard Model -- and the mystery why anti-matter is so rare compared to matter, its counterpart. Supersymmetry could explain why visible matter only accounts for ~4% of the cosmos. Dark matter (23%) and dark energy (73%) account for the rest.
- Completed in 2008, the LHC cost 6.03 billion Swiss francs (roughly 5.9 billion euros, 4.5 billion dollars).
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And here's A timeline of Particle physics
Quote:
5th century BC: Greek philosopher Democritus suggests the Universe consists of empty space and of invisible and indivisible particles called atoms.
1802: John Dalton, a Quaker-educated English physicist and chemist, lays groundwork of modern theory of the elements and the atom.
1897: Electron discovered by Britain's Joseph Thomson, who later proposes a "plum pudding" model of the atom. He suggests the atom is a slightly positive sphere with raisin-like electrons inside that have a negative charge.
1899-1919: New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford identifies atomic nucleus, the proton and alpha and beta particles.
1920s: Advances in quantum theory, about the behaviour of matter at the atomic level.
1932: Neutron, similar to the proton but with no electrical charge, is discovered by James Chadwick of Britain. The first antiparticle, the positron (the mirror particle to the electron), is discovered by American Carl Anderson.
1934: Italy's Enrico Fermi postulates the existence of the neutrino (Italian for "little neutral one"), a neutral-charge partner to the electron. Theory is confirmed in 1959.
1950s: Invention of particle accelerator leads to surge in discoveries of sub-atomic particles.
1964:
- British physicist Peter Higgs postulates existence of a particle, later known as the Higgs Boson, that provides mass to otherwise massless particles.
- Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig of the United States propose that protons and neutrons are comprised of quarks.
1974: Development of the "Standard Model," a theory that everything in the Universe comprises 12 building blocks divided into two families, leptons and quarks, and these are governed by four fundamental forces.
1977-2000: Flurry of discoveries that strengthens Standard Model hypothesis, including the existence of bottom and top quarks, tau lepton, gluon, tau neutrino and the W and Z bosons which help carry the "weak" force.
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