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unhappycamper

(60,364 posts)
Wed Jun 25, 2014, 08:18 AM Jun 2014

Higgs boson even MORE likely to actually be Higgs boson - boffins

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/23/higgs_boson_fermion_proof_found_by_massachusetts_institute_technology/



They're here, they're real, they're staying, declares MIT

Higgs boson even MORE likely to actually be Higgs boson - boffins
By Brid-Aine Parnell, 23 Jun 2014

Boffins are becoming increasingly hardline in their stance on the particle discovered in 2012 and lauded as the Higgs boson. They say it is, in fact, the Higgs boson and not something else.

Researchers have discovered that the bosons decay into fermions, which are a group of particles that include ones like leptons and quarks. That’s a good thing because it’s exactly what the Standard Model of particle physics predicts the Higgs boson should do.

“This is an enormous breakthrough,” said Markus Klute, an assistant professor of physics at MIT and leader of the international group of boffins. “Now we know that particles like electrons get their mass by coupling to the Higgs field, which is really exciting.”

Preliminary studies hinted with a fair amount of certainty that the particle spotted by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider two years ago had properties consistent with those predicted for the Higgs boson. Looking into the data produced by the CERN experiments has shown that like the expected boson, the new particle has no spin and rapidly decays by splitting into pairs of photons, W bosons or Z bosons.
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