Ah so it's not 100% certain what they found is actually the higgs boson. No problem. Hehehe. I have an idea. This will be a game changer, but it's also an open door..


Hehehe. Thannnnnnnnx!

Nothing in science is 100% anything

Rhonda, yes, it's extremely difficult to find the higgs boson.

We'd have a much better chance if there was lots of them!

Yours truly...
Ignoramus

I've heard on good authority the Higgs Boson they are looking for is hiding in the bottom of a long forgotten bottle of phlogiston at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago . . .

Peter Higgs got his Nobel prize (along with Englert) in 2013 after it was announced to be discovered on July 4, 2012. That tells you something about how confident people are. Now, nothing is ever 100% certain, and while we can be very very confident that a new particle has indeed been found, one can never know its properties with 100% accuracy, and it is therefore always possible that small deviations are found from the theoretically predicted values e.g for its interaction strength with other particles, or its lifetime. You can now ask two questions:

- Are there deviations in the properties of the discovered boson from theoretical predictions?

- How strongly can the boson deviate in its properties from theoretical predictions until we would stop calling it 'a Higgs boson'.

So far, the properties measured perfectly align with a Higgs boson of the simplest kind *within the error bars*. That is highly nontrivial because a whole list of interactions strengths of the new Boson with other particles has been measured, and while they could in principle be anything, what was found matches exactly what is predicted by the Higgs hypothesis. In fact, just a couple of weeks ago CERN announced that the interaction of the July 2012 boson with bottom quarks has finally been measured, and has just the expected intensity for a Higgs boson as evidenced by the rate at which the boson is observed to decay to pairs of bottom quarks.

The fact that the new boson has these interactions with W, Z bosons, gluons and photons indirectly, bottom quarks, ..
, tells us that it at least partly fulfills the role of the theoretical construct "Higgs boson" in nature. The Higgs hypothesis has generated a whole list of falsifiable predictions which have instead been confirmed. There is ons smoking gun signature left to measure, which distinguishes the simplest type of Higgs boson from other related hypotheses, namely the interaction of the new boson with itself. This, however, is very difficult to measure, because one has to observe the simultaneous creation of two bosons to measure it. This will be accomplished in th next decade, but it is very hard. When that measurement turns out as predicted, we will have even more reason to call the new boson a "Higgs boson". If not, we will probably simply call it a nonstandard Higgs boson because all the other properties match up.

Nope.

They found it.

Now it's kept in a crate in a secure location next to the lost ark...

The one that doesn't conform is obviously a Hicks boson! Hehe

You guys are so silly. The discoveries of the large hardon collider are a very serious topic.

I saw this doc on netflix: http://particlefever.com/

I understood that the weight of the Higgs Boson was not what the Supersymmetry Theorists or the Multiverse Theorists planned. That left everyone going back to the drawing board.

(July 17, 2017 at 5:25 am)chimp3 Wrote: I saw this doc on netflix: http://particlefever.com/

I understood that the weight of the Higgs Boson was not what the Supersymmetry Theorists or the Multiverse Theorists planned. That left everyone going back to the drawing board.

Nomura and Hall argued that it should have a large self interaction in the multiverse and that that should lead to a mass of 145 GeV or so. We wrote a paper showing that in the presence of certain symmetries, this roughly reduces to the observed 126 GeV. So it seems like we live in a universe with a bit more strucure than Hall and Nomura assumed.