News Flash: Higgs Remains Missing
Sep 9 at 5:05pm by Aileen
As the LHC accelerator at CERN prepares to complete final whole-torus testing and “shoot the moon” with particles colliding at ~5TeV per beam, the report from the DZero experiment at Fermilab’s Tevatron is in - “Wiggly Higgly” (the so-called “God Particle” that imparts mass to matter) remains missing in action at 170GeV/c2.
The prediction that the Higgs boson would appear at 114GeV/c2 was ruled out in 2000, this experiment rules out the next best guess of mass for the exchange particle. This finding will tend to put more importance on findings expected from the higher energy levels at LHC over the next few years, though experimenters have long believed Higgs would be discovered at the lower Tevatron energies. That appears to have been ruled out too.
Higgs is probably the most famous component of the ‘Standard Model’ of physics to remain MIA after so much expense over so many years of seeking answers about the nature of nature. The Tevatron experiment did succeed in producing Z boson pairs, so researchers had maintained hope for Higgs at this level.
It took 600 physicists from 90 institutions in 18 countries to determine that Higgs is not present at 170GeV. Perhaps the LHC physicists will have better luck while they’re busy producing quark-gluon plasmas, mini black holes and other odd sub-sub-particles of interest. It’s scheduled to be fully up and running by October, so some answers should come soon!
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