Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Scientists may have found two different Higgs bosons


Scientists studying data from the Large Hadron Collider who announced the possible discovery of the 'God particle' - Higgs boson - now say they may have actually found not one, but two previously unknown particles.
The most recent release from the Atlas experiment at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) showed the scientists seem to have found one Higgs boson with one mass, and then another with a statistically significant slightly higher mass, the 'Daily Mail' reported.
There seems to be one version of Higgs boson with a mass of 123.5 gigaelectron volts (the unit particle physicists prefer using to measure mass) and a second Higgs with a mass of 126.6 GeV.
First proposed in 1964, the Higgs boson is the last missing piece of the Standard Model, a widely accepted theory that describes the basic building blocks of the universe.
According to that model of our world, the Higgs particle must exist to bestow mass on other fundamental particles. However, until it was possible to build high-powered colliders like the LHC, it has been impossible to detect.
Researchers at CERN in July announced that they believed their experiments had finally revealed the Higgs, but their findings may have been far from definite, the paper said.
The Higgs they found appeared to show that the Higgs seemed to be decaying into two photons more often than they had expected - hinting at a new, as yet unimagined physics.
Now, scientists with the project's Atlas experiment have finally admitted the bizarre revelations from their data - that there appears to be not one Higgs' boson signal, but two, the paper quoted 'Scientific American' as saying.

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