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For a subatomic subatomic particle that remained hide out for nearly 50 class , the Higgs boson is turning out to be unusually well bear .
Yet more grounds from the world ’s big particle accelerator , theLarge Hadron Collider(LHC ) in Switzerland , confirms that the Higgs boson particle , thought to excuse why other particles have mass , playact just as predicted by theStandard Model , the dominant physics theory that describes the menagerie of subatomic particles that make up the universe .
An artist’s conception of the Higgs boson.
" This is exactly what we have expected from the Standard Model , " said Markus Klute , a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the researchers involve in the Higgs hunting .
The unexampled results show that theHiggs bosondecays into subatomic speck that carry matter called fermions — in special , it decays into a heavier brother mote of the electron yell a tau lepton , Klute said . This decay has been predicted by the Standard Model . Even so , the finding are a bit of a disappointment for physicists who were desire for hints of altogether young physics . [ Top 5 Implications of the Higgs Boson Discovery ]
God particle discovered
On July 4 , 2012 , scientists at the LHC herald they had found the Higgs boson , an problematical particle first proposed 50 geezerhood ago by English physicist Peter Higgs . In Higgs ' conception , in the blink after theBig Bang , an energy field , now dubbed the Higgs theatre , emerged that imparts mass to the subatomic particles that trawl through it . molecule that are " stickier " and slow down more while traversing the field of battle become heavier .
Because subatomic particles are either subject carriers call fermions , such aselectronsand proton , or personnel - carry speck called boson , such as photon and gluon , the existence of the Higgs field implied an associated force - carry particle , called the Higgs boson , which is like a ripple in that field , Klute said .
The 2012 discovery left fiddling doubt that the Higgs boson exists , and Higgs and his colleague , François Englert , won theNobel Prizefor the theory in 2013 . But there were still many unanswered questions . Is there one Higgs boson or multiple ? If there are multiple , what are their masses ? And just how do these different - flavor Higgs deport ? [ Nature ’s Tiniest Particles Dissected ( Infographic ) ]
Well - act atom
To answer those interrogative , physicists still had to center over lashings of data from the LHC , which speed proton to just below thespeed of luminosity , then smash them together , make a cascade of subatomic particles .
Of the billions of collisions produced by the LHC every second , just a few hundred had the touch energy levels associated with the Higgs boson , Klute said .
When the LHC collaborators analyzed those Higgs events , they found about 6 percent of the baffling particles decayed into tau lepton , Klute told Live Science . And though not unexpected , the new termination show no hint of additional Higgs bosons that would lend acceptance to alternating theories such assupersymmetry , which predicts that every particle currently known has a " superpartner " with slightly dissimilar properties .
Unanswered motion
The idea of the Higgs decaying to tau leptons was somewhat tacked onto the Standard Model after its world , yet this " ad hoc addition to the Standard modeling turns out to be how nature does it , " Klute read .
But there are still a few pieces left to complete the picture predicted by the Standard Model , said Nitesh Soni , a particle physicist at the University of Adelaide in Australia , who work on a dissimilar experimentation at the LHC that focuses on like physical science questions .
" The Higgs is forecast to decay into some other subatomic particle too , but those have relatively smaller decomposition rates and higher background " stochasticity , nominate it too difficult to detect those particle from the current dataset , Soni said .
New natural philosophy ?
Though the Standard Model has been spectacularly successful at predicting behavior in the subatomic kingdom , there has to be more to the law of nature , Klute said .
For instance , the Standard Model ca n’t explaindark matteror the existence of gravitation . So the lack of evidence for something new is a piffling disappointing , Klute said .
" My hope was that we would already find some unexampled physic , " Klute read .
But he ’s not giving up hope yet . The hunt for Modern particles will keep on once the LHC is turn on again at much high energy in 2015 , Klute said .
The new analysis of the LHC data was published yesterday ( June 22 ) in the journal Nature Physics .
