Higgs Boson Likely a Boring Boson [and documentary]

Ian O'Neill  

The thing with physicists is that they love discovering something unexpected, strange or exotic. This mindset is what makes physics, and indeed all science disciplines, awesome. But in light of the grand announcement of the probable discovery of the elusive Higgs boson in July, it looks like the particle that was discovered is likely a "standard" Higgs boson. As in, it's a little bit boring.

Of course, "boring" is a relative term. The story of the hunt for the Higgs -- the 'exchange particle' that endows matter with mass -- reads like a Dan Brown novel, culminating in the construction of the biggest, boldest and most complex machine mankind has ever conceived: the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). There's more twists, turns and subplots than you can shake a lepton at.

But the famous Higgs boson, that until recently has been purely a theoretical particle only appearing in equations, looks like it comes from the Standard Model of physics and not something more exotic.

The Standard Model is a set of equations and particles that underpin our known Universe. It's a recipe book of sorts and works like this: If you collide particle A with particle B you get particle C plus some energy -- we know what will come out of a particle interaction even before the interaction takes place. There's nothing unexpected in this recipe book; so it doesn't work like this: If you collide particle A with particle B you get particle Q and -- what the #$%@?! -- a small elephant playing with a black hole!

The latter scenario would violate our known laws of physics, suggesting something more exotic is going on. In that case, there would be some kind of new physics, something beyond the Standard Model at play -- perhaps an exotic result from the LHC would provide evidence of "supersymmetry." One interpretation of supersymmetry suggests there may be an entire family of Higgs bosons that cannot be explained by the Standard Model. However, supersymmetry has recently been dealt a "hospitalizing" blow. 

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TheNovadex On the 4th July 2012 the Higgs Boson was found with a mass of 125-126 GeV.
Why was it soo important to create a multi billion dollar device to detect it.