CERN physicists have moved the focus of their search for the Higgs boson, the particle many think gave the universe form after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago, to a narrow band on the mass spectrum, a spokesman said on Wednesday.
And science bloggers close to the research center are suggesting it might be clear by the middle of next month that the boson is a chimera and some other mechanism to explain how matter changed to mass at the birth of the cosmos will have to be sought.
“The higher mass region has now been virtually ruled out, but the Higgs it could still be anywhere in the lower 114-141GeV [giga-electron-volts] range,” said James Gillies of CERN, the 21-nation European Organization for Nuclear Research near Geneva, Switzerland.
Physicists such as Italian Tomasso Dorigo, who works with CERN, now say that — if it exists — the Higgs should be found at around 120GeV (http://www.science20.com/quantum_diaries_survivor), while independent British researcher Philip Gibbs goes for 140GeV on his site, http://vixra.org/.
GeV is a term used in physics to quantify particle energy fields. Searches for the Higgs in CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the now-closed Tevatron at the US Fermilab have ranged up to 476GeV.
Results from analysis up to the end of June in the LHC, which smashes together millions of particles per second at a tiny fraction under the speed of light, were presented at a conference in Paris last week.
However, these slipped by almost unnoticed even by many specialists in the particle physics community, which has been more focused recently on an Italian research center’s claim to have recorded neutrino particles moving faster than light.
The latest Higgs findings were compiled jointly by two usually competing LHC research teams — ATLAS and CMS — and Gillies said both were working hard to try to complete analysis of data from the collider gathered up to the start of this month.
CERN’s ruling council meets from Dec. 12 to Dec. 16 and any concrete sign of the Higgs — whose existence was postulated four decades ago by British scientist Peter Higgs — would be reported during that session.
However, CERN physicist and blogger Pauline Gagnon said on Wednesday that the low mass range, where scientists had always thought they would find the particle, was also the one where it would be more difficult to see.
The Higgs, she said, “is playing hard to catch.” (http://www.quantumdiaries.org/2011/11/23/where-do-we-stand-on-the-higgs-boson-search/)
“It might be that it does not even exist,” she said, a possibility already raised by other researchers and by CERN chief Rolf Heuer.
The particle is part of the 30-year-old Standard Model of particle physics that seeks to explain how the universe works at its most basic level, but it is almost the only element of the model whose existence had not yet been proven.
If it is not found, Gagnon said, “we need to move on to explore the next set of possibilities.”
One suggestion came this week from a self-proclaimed non-scientist in a comment on the Quantum Diaries blog.
“It will be in essence ethereal, kind of like a spirit being, existing for the purpose of holding everything together,” he wrote.
Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg was deported from Israel yesterday, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, the day after the Israeli navy prevented her and a group of fellow pro-Palestinian activists from sailing to Gaza. Thunberg, 22, was put on a flight to France, the ministry said, adding that she would travel on to Sweden from there. Three other people who had been aboard the charity vessel also agreed to immediate repatriation. Eight other crew members are contesting their deportation order, Israeli rights group Adalah, which advised them, said in a statement. They are being held at a detention center ahead of a
A Chinese scientist was arrested while arriving in the US at Detroit airport, the second case in days involving the alleged smuggling of biological material, authorities said on Monday. The scientist is accused of shipping biological material months ago to staff at a laboratory at the University of Michigan. The FBI, in a court filing, described it as material related to certain worms and requires a government permit. “The guidelines for importing biological materials into the US for research purposes are stringent, but clear, and actions like this undermine the legitimate work of other visiting scholars,” said John Nowak, who leads field
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
NUCLEAR WARNING: Elites are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers, perhaps because they have access to shelters, Tulsi Gabbard said After a trip to Hiroshima, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday warned that “warmongers” were pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Gabbard did not specify her concerns. Gabbard posted on social media a video of grisly footage from the world’s first nuclear attack and of her staring reflectively at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. On Aug. 6, 1945, the US obliterated Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people in the explosion and by the end of the year from the uranium bomb’s effects. Three days later, a US plane dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, leaving abut 74,000 people dead by the
RSS