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Has the Higgs Boson Particle Field Been Hiding in Plain Sight?
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Jan 24, 2008 11:22 AM
from the it-blinded-us-with-science dept.
from the it-blinded-us-with-science dept.
sciencehabit writes with a link to the ScienceNow site, noting an article saying the Higgs boson may already have been found in previous observations of the known universe. A theorist at Michigan state is arguing that scientists may have already found evidence for the elusive particle. The key appears to be that the particles that make up the Higgs field are of various 'strengths', and some of those particles may tug on others very weakly. "The lightest Higgs can be very light indeed, but it would not have been seen at [CERN's Large Electron-Positron (LEP)], because LEP experimenters were looking for an energetic collision that made a Z that then spit out a Higgs. That wouldn't happen very often if the lightest Higgs and the Z hardly interact. 'Just within the simplest supersymmetric model, there's still room for Higgs that is missed,' Yuan says. However, this lightweight Higgs is not exactly the Higgs everyone is looking for, says Marcela Carena, a theorist at Fermilab. 'The Higgs they are talking about is not the one responsible for giving mass to the W and Z,' she says. It can't be because it hardly interacts with those particles, Carena says. Indeed, in Yuan's model, the role of mass-giver falls to one of the heavier Higgses, which is still heavier than the LEP limit, she notes."
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Entertainment: CERN Scientists Looking for the Force 284 comments
An anonymous reader writes "National Geographic has a fascinating article on the God Particle, which can help explain the Standard Model and get us closer to explain the Grand Unified Theory. The obligatory Star Wars-angle summary is even better: 'CERN's scientists, the fine people who brought us the W and Z particles, anti-hydrogen atoms and hyperlinked porn web pages, are now hard at work building the Large Hadron Collider to discover something even cooler: the Force. Yes, that Force. Or like physicists call it, the Higgs boson, a particle that carries a field which interacts with every living or inert matter.'"
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the last place you look (Score:5, Funny)
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I knew it wasn't me!!!
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Doesn't the drier affect have to do with putting two pairs of black socks into the washer and getting three black socks and one blue one out of the drier? Perhaps you were thinking of the DB25 affect where when reassembling an elderly computer system you will -- with 50% probability -- find that when attempting to make the last connectio
Re:the last place you look (Score:5, Funny)
Tastes like an orange too.
Actually, come to think of it, I think this might be an orange.
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Re:the last place you look (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:the last place you look (Score:5, Funny)
Yep ... Were all doomed!
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson_(fiction) [wikipedia.org] "In the science fantasy series Lexx, one character points out that although all-out nuclear war sometimes destroys all life on planets as advanced as Earth, it is much more common for such planets to be obliterated by physicists attempting to determine the precise mass of the Higgs boson particle, since the moment the mass is known the planet will instantly collapse into a nugget of super-dense matter "roughly the size of a pea."
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For those that went "wtf?!" (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:For those that went "wtf?!" (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:For those that went "wtf?!" (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:For those that went "wtf?!" (Score:5, Funny)
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Am I missing something? (Score:2)
"Physicists suspect that empty space is permeated by a Higgs field, which is a bit like an electric field. And just as an electric field consists of particles called photons, the Higgs field consists of particles called Higgs bosons. The Higgs field drags on particles to give them mass, akin to molasses tugging on a spoon."
Electric fields consist of photons? If that's not a typo of some kind, would someone care to explain?
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"In physics, the photon is the elementary particle responsible for electromagnetic phenomena. It is the carrier of electromagnetic radiation of all wavelengths, including gamma rays, X-rays, ultraviolet light, visible light, infrared light, microwaves, and radio waves."
For some reason, my feeble mind never really made that connection.
Re:Am I missing something? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Am I missing something? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Am I missing something? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Am I missing something? (Score:5, Funny)
Simple .
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
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Re:Am I missing something? (Score:4, Funny)
It's all relative, friend.
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Absolutely!
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Electric fields consist of photons? If that's not a typo of some kind, would someone care to explain?
I think the author forgot to specify that the electric field is time-varying (to have an associated magnetic field). The combination of the two varying fields propagates as an electromagnetic wave ie light (photons). Take a look at Maxwell's Equations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_equations [wikipedia.org]
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No, you're dead on (Score:4, Informative)
Since nobody's made this point yet, I'll put it out there.
The statement is literally correct. Say you have a field in 3-space. That field itself is a 3-vector at every point in that space. When you make a fourier transform of the field, you get the field as a function of a momentum-like 3 vector. That vector is quantized, and the excitations of it are what we refer to as "photons". Add in special relativity, and you have the basics of quantum field theory.
Try the first chapter of Lahiri and Pal's "A First Book of Quantum Field Theory". If you've had undergrad calculus, it shouldn't be that bad.
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Yikes! (Score:3, Interesting)
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Perhaps, but in the process we'd obtain important new data that greatly reduces the uncertainty in the parameters of the Drake Equation.
The Higgs Boson (Score:3, Interesting)
It is the only Standard Model particle not yet observed, but would help explain how otherwise
massless elementary particles, still manage to construct mass in matter. In particular, the difference between the massless photon and the relatively massive W and Z bosons
I always wondered what they use to measure the mass of elementary particles (not atoms). Can anyone explain? Also, maybe photons and higgs boson do have mass, but our instruments just aren't sensitive enough (kinda what the summary is saying)?
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If you put a particle with known velocity and electrical charge in a known magnetical field, it will run on a circle. You can calculate its mass by the circle's radius.
At particle accelerators the magnetical field there is a given, since you need it to keep the particles inside the building while they are gaining speed.
Re:The Higgs Boson (Score:5, Informative)
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In cup size, I suppose that would be relatively massive.
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I always wondered what they use to measure the mass of elementary particles (not atoms). Can anyone explain?
Mass, energy, and momentum are related by a simple equation. If you know the momentum and the energy of a particle, then you can determine its mass.
The momentum of a charged particle can be measured from the curvature of the particle's trajectory in a magnetic field.
Energy can be determined through various means, which usually have to do with measuring the energy given off when the particle slows down when going through matter. For example, you could have a leaded glass block. As a fast-moving electron
Re:The Higgs Boson (Score:5, Informative)
Mostly it comes down to conservation of mass/energy. If we know we put 3 electrons and 20GeV of energy into the reaction chamber and got out 2 electrons, 10GeV and one unknown particle then that unknown particle must have a combined mass/energy to balance things out. (Remember that E=mc^2 so mass could have been converted to energy and vice vesa.)
So how did they measure the mass of the first particle? As one of the sibling posts said, put an electrically charged particle into a static electric field and watch how fast the field moves the particle (this can be observed at the macroscopic scale using gas bubble chambers).
Of course the above requires you to know the charge of the particle, so how do we measure the charge of an elementary particle? Simple! Fill the air with neutrally charged oil droplets and "spray" them with the particle. Some droplets will pick up 1 particle and some will pickup 2 or 3 or 4. Put them in a static electric field and measure how strong the field has to be to suspend the droplets against the force of gravity. You don't have to know which ones picked up how many particle, you just have to measure the difference in the required field strength. (See the Oil-drop experiment; note measuring the mass of oil droplets is hard be macroscopically possible.)
So in summary: we measure particle mass in terms of the masses of other particles. The first particle's mass was measured in terms of it's electric charge. The first particle's electric charge was measured in terms of how much force it imparted on an oil droplet. The oil droplet's mass was measured relative to a lump of platinum-iridium sitting in Paris. That lump was just pointed to and called 1 kilogram.
Any questions?
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will CERN become a theme park now? (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe we could put it to good use as a theme park ride instead. Imaging all those superconducting magnets accelerating your cart up to 99.99% of the speed of light - what a ride that would be.
With the relativistic effects, you might even be able to come out of the ride before you went in.
The fact that it operates in a vacuum might be a problem ... have to think about that.
They were looking where? (Score:2, Funny)
Time long ago, galaxy far away (Score:3, Funny)
Correction (Score:2, Interesting)
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What's this ... ? (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, look! It's a Higgs boson!
This isn't the Higgs Boson you're looking for (Score:3, Funny)
You can go about your business.
Move along.
Hiding right in front of us? (Score:5, Funny)
Which suggests that we are one step closer to actually creating an infinite improbability drive - the ramifications of which are... well I don't know, but they are at least big, possibly huge.
Re:Higgses (Score:5, Funny)
Nasty Hobbitses...and their mean Higgses make Precious feel so heavy.
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Re:Higgses (Score:5, Funny)
You say that now, but she'll look better after a couple of drinkses.
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Re:Dear fucking assholes (Slashdot editors) (Score:5, Informative)
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I now feel fully qualified to provide insightful c
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Re:Antiparticles / antimass? (Score:4, Interesting)
You get a negative energy.
This is actually possible near the event horizon of a spinning blackhole. The zero energy state around a spinning blackhole is a particular orbit (I believe due to frame dragging, but I'm not positive), but a slower orbit must have lower energy which thus must be negative energy. The Penrose process uses this trick to extract energy from a blackhole.
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