Confirmed! Newfound Particle Is the Higgs

[JaneyVee]

A newfound particle discovered at the world's largest atom smasher last year is, indeed, the Higgs boson, the particle thought to give other matter its mass, scientists reported today (March 14) at the annual Rencontres de Moriond conference in Italy.

Physicists announced on July 4, 2012, that, with more than 99 percent certainty, they had found a new elementary particle weighing about 126 times the mass of the proton that was likely the long-sought Higgs boson. The Higgs is sometimes referred to as the "God particle," to the chagrin of many scientists, who prefer its official name.

But the two experiments, CMS and ATLAS, hadn't collected enough data to say the particle was, for sure, the Higgs boson, the last undiscovered piece of the puzzle predicted by the Standard Model, the reigning theory of particle physics.

Now, after collecting two and a half times more data inside the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — where protons zip at near light-speed around the 17-mile-long (27 kilometer) underground ring beneath Switzerland and France — physicists say the particle is the Higgs.

The rest: http://news.yahoo.com/confirmed-newfound-particle-higgs-130317830.html

[LiberalEsto]

1. It's the Flying Spaghetti Monster!

Pastafarians, we must celebrate!

[nonoyes]

3. A solemn holy toast to the

Spaghetti monster, confirmed, the origin of mass !

[Melinda]

2. Oh great, now I'm REALLY depressed. Confirmed: Our universe is doomed.

Bummer that.

[derby378]

6. Here's some perspective...

Without the Higgs, there might not have been a physical universe in the first place, and therefore no chance for such a universe to be doomed.

And considering some of the theories surrounding M-theory and other universes, "doomed" might be a relative term.

[longship]

4. Hooray for Peter Higgs!

R&K

[DreamGypsy]

5. Still uncertain what kind of Higgs has been found.

From the article:

"The preliminary results with the full 2012 data set are magnificent and to me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson though we still have a long way to go to know what kind of Higgs boson it is," said CMS spokesperson Joe Incandela in a statement.

Dave Charlton, ATLAS spokesperson agreed, the new results "point to the new particle having the spin-parity of a Higgs boson as in the Standard Model," referring to a quantum property of elementary particles.

To confirm the particle as the Higgs boson, physicists needed to collect tons of data that would reveal its quantum properties as well as how it interacted with other particles. For instance, a Higgs particle should have no spin and its parity, or the measure of how its mirror image behaves, should be positive, both of which were supported by data from the ATLAS and CMS experiments.

Even so, the scientists are not sure whether this Higgs boson is the one predicted by the Standard Model or perhaps the lightest of several bosons predicted to exist by other theories.

So, what are the choices for kinds of Higgs?? From Wikipedia:

The Minimal Standard Model as described above is the simplest known model for the Higgs mechanism with just one Higgs field. However, an extended Higgs sector with additional Higgs particle doublets or triplets is also possible, and many extensions of the Standard Model have this feature. The non-minimal Higgs sector favoured by theory are the two-Higgs-doublet models (2HDM), which predict the existence of a quintet of scalar particles: two CP-even neutral Higgs bosons h0 and H0, a CP-odd neutral Higgs boson A0, and two charged Higgs particles H±. Supersymmetry ("SUSY&quot also predicts relations between the Higgs-boson masses and the masses of the gauge bosons, and could accommodate a 125 GeV/c2 neutral Higgs boson.

The key method to distinguish between these different models involves study of the particles' interactions ("coupling&quot and exact decay processes ("branching ratios&quot , which can be measured and tested experimentally in particle collisions. In the Type-I 2HDM model one Higgs doublet couples to up and down quarks, while the second doublet does not couple to quarks. This model has two interesting limits, in which the lightest Higgs couples to just fermions ("gauge-phobic&quot or just gauge bosons ("fermiophobic&quot , but not both. In the Type-II 2HDM model, one Higgs doublet only couples to up-type quarks, the other only couples to down-type quarks.[99] The heavily researched Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) includes a Type-II 2HDM Higgs sector, so it could be disproven by evidence of a Type-I 2HDM Higgs.[citation needed]

In other models the Higgs scalar is a composite particle. For example, in technicolor the role of the Higgs field is played by strongly bound pairs of fermions called techniquarks. Other models, feature pairs of top quarks (see top quark condensate). In yet other models, there is no Higg.s field at all and the electroweak symmetry is broken using extra dimensions.

See also Alternatives to the Standard Model Higgs.

Thanks for the post, JV.