(July 17, 2017 at 6:23 pm)bennyboy Wrote:(July 17, 2017 at 1:19 am)Alex K Wrote: 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.
What does this mean? They produced a boson with the same techniques but with new measurement capabilities? I'm confused. And please don't tell me the measurement or anything is 496 something, or I'm officially becoming a numerologist and spending the rest of my life making crayon drawings in a cave.
According to theory, once you make a Higgs boson, it almost immediately decays and can only be sen indirectly via the decay products. It has a better than 50% chance to immediately decay into a b quark and an anti-b-quark. The decays through which it has been discovered ae much rarer. Why didn't experiments observe the Higgs boson through the b anti-b quarks in 2012 you may wonder. That's because b anti-b pairs are produced in huge amounts by other means, completely drowning the ones coming from Higgs decays. So you need lots of precision and good statistics to isolate those.
The fool hath said in his heart, There is a God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good.
Psalm 14, KJV revised edition
