In July of 2012, researchers at CERN announced that the 40 year hunt for the elusive Higgs boson may have come to an end. The announcement made headlines around the world, and particle physicists considered it a critical discovery to be one of the first of many from the lab’s famous Large Hadron Collider. But scientists at the University of Southern Denmark’s Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics Phenomenology are now casting doubt, saying that the detected particle may not be the elusive Higgs boson after all.
The Higgs boson is one of the key building blocks of the Standard Model of particle physics. The standard model attempts to explain the electromagnetic, weak, and strong nuclear forces, and the Higgs boson is a critical piece of the puzzle. Its discovery would lead the way to understanding the Higgs field, which, in turn, would explain how everything we see around us has mass. So, the announcement from CERN that it had been detected was received with much fanfare… excitement which might now be premature.
The current data is not precise enough to determine exactly what the particle is,” says university researcher Mads Toudal Frandsen. “It could be a number of other known particles.”
Frandsen’s team now suggests that the detected particle may not only not be a Higgs boson, but it could be a ‘techni-higgs’ particle which would support a set of theories that are beyond the standard model known as ‘Technicolor”.
“A techni-higgs particle is not an elementary particle. Instead, it consists of so-called techni-quarks, which we believe are elementary,” he says.
“Techni-quarks may bind together in various ways to form for instance techni-higgs particles, while other combinations may form dark matter. We therefore expect to find several different particles at the LHC, all built by techni-quarks.”
The ultimate verdict most likely likes deep in the heart of the now-dormant LHC, which is currently silent while CERN scientists work to increase the power of the world’s most powerful particle supercollider. CERN hopes to have the LHC back online in early 2015.
[button link=”http://www.techtimes.com/articles/19802/20141108/shocking-cern-may-not-have-discovered-elusive-higgs-boson-particle-after-all.htm” icon=”fa-external-link” side=”left” target=”blank” color=”285b5e” textcolor=”ffffff”]Source: Tech Times[/button]Last Updated on November 27, 2018.
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