Physicists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, said Thursday that the new particle discovered with enormous fanfare last summer definitely looks like a Higgs boson, the particle famously predicted by Peter Higgs and others to imbue elementary particles with mass. But they said they still needed more data to understand how it works and what it means for the universe.
“The preliminary results with the full 2012 data set are magnificent,” Joe Incandela, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and leader of one of the discovery teams, said in a statement released by CERN. “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.”
After rummaging through the data from some 2,000 trillion collisions of subatomic particles in the Large Hadron Collider — more than twice as much data as led to the original discovery — physicists meeting at a workshop in La Thuile, Italy, said that they still did not know if there was only one Higgs boson, as predicted by the Standard Model, the reigning theory in physics, or if the new particle was only the lightest of a whole set of Higgs bosons, a circumstance envisioned by some more advanced and speculative theories.
The verdict will hinge on more detailed measurements of the particle’s properties, like its spin and how it decays relative to other particles. The Higgs boson is supposed to have no spin at all; it is the knuckleball of the subatomic world.
CERN’s collider, just outside Geneva, is now down for two years of repairs, but its teams have stockpiled their unanalyzed data, and look forward to the prospect of more years of high-energy collisions starting in 2015.
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