Higgs boson found?

[Connemara]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/06/sc...rticle.html?hp

Big news from Fermilab.

 

[Blackhood]

Another explanation might be that it is evidence of a new force of nature — in addition to gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces we already know and are baffled by — that would manifest itself only at very short distances like those that rule inside the atomic nucleus.

I was under the impression that "we" had a fairly good understanding about the fundamental forces?

 

[Harold falcon]

are planning to announce Wednesday that they have found a suspicious bump in their data that could be evidence of a new elementary particle or even, some say, a new force of nature.

What a garbage news story. It's a story about maybe announcing something that maybe something that is maybe a new force of nature.

This is why journalism is dead. They have no one to blame but themselves.

 

[Connemara]

Originally Posted by harvey_birdman

What a garbage news story. It's a story about maybe announcing something that maybe something that is maybe a new force of nature.

This is why journalism is dead. They have no one to blame but themselves.

I used a sensationalist threak title so more people would view.

 

[fuji]

Strong and weak force already operate only under very short distances like the nucleus of an atom. The article makes it sound like this supposed new force if the only force that does it. I don't believe they have found the higgs boson. The energy levels required to detect it are higher then the fermi accelerator can produce, which is why CERN was built to begin with.

 

[Harold falcon]

Originally Posted by Connemara

I used a sensationalist threak title so more people would view.

It worked.

 

[MrGoodBytes]

I think fermi is grasping at straws. I do live really close to it and do occasionally talk to a few people from the facility and I was aware that they felt they had been close to something the past two years, but I think they would've made this announcement regardless if they had something or not as a gambit for funding but its too late for that.... they are being mothballed.

sad really.

 

[yachtie]

Originally Posted by Blackhood

I was under the impression that "we" had a fairly good understanding about the fundamental forces?

No. What we have a model that seems to work. Not really an understanding.

 

[james_timothy]

We have a great model, and it works spectacularly well. Unfortunately, it depends on quantum mechanics, which no one understands.

Fermilab is not grasping at straws- there is no debate, the Tevatron is being shut down in October and that was decided months ago. This is the work of a graduate student- and she did very good work over the last couple of years on this.

The bump looks really good- but what it isn't is the Higgs boson, wrong place, too big, etc. Best bet going is that it is weird Z boson that only likes quarks, not leptons; that is spectacularly weird, given the success of electroweak theory, but that is the data. The data only gives evidence for, though, not discovery of (~3 sigma, not > 5 sigma). A new boson means a new force, but it'd be some variant of electroweak. If it is the Z' boson theorists are talking about, it contributes to the story of dark matter, too.

The way the bump can go away is if the background subtraction was messed up; people are talking about the difference in energy scale between quark-based jets and gluon-based jets. Confirmation or rejection will be known in a couple of months when both the other detector at Fermi does the analysis and the LHC does the analysis. And when they redo the current analysis with twice the data, which is in the can.

It's really cool stuff, but it isn't definitive yet.

 

[Fang66]

http://news.ninemsn.com.au/technology/8494184/strong-evidence-of-new-particle-scientist

 

[acidboy]