Higgs boson quest narrows: Does it exist?

GENEVA?? CERN physicists have moved the focus of their search for the Higgs boson, the particle many think gave the universe its form after the big bang 13.7 billion years ago, to a narrow band on the mass spectrum, a spokesman said Wednesday.

Science bloggers close to the research center are suggesting it might be clear by mid-December that the boson is a chimera, and some other mechanism would have to be sought to explain how matter took on mass at the birth of the cosmos.

"The higher mass region has now been virtually ruled out, but the Higgs could still be anywhere in the lower 114-141 GeV range," James Gillies of CERN, the 21-nation European Organization for Nuclear Research near Geneva, told Reuters.

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Some physicists, such as Italian Tomasso Dorigo, who works with CERN, say that the Higgs should be found at around 120 GeV. Independent British researcher Philip Gibbs, meanwhile, goes for 140 GeV.

GeV, or giga electron-volts, is a term used in physics to quantify particle energy fields. Searches for the Higgs in CERN's Large Hadron Collider and the now-closed Tevatron at Fermilab in Illinois have ranged up to 476 GeV.

Results from analysis up to the end of June in the LHC, which smashes together millions of particles per second at velocities just a tiny fraction less than the speed of light, were presented at a conference in Paris last week.

These reports slipped by almost unnoticed, even by many specialists in the particle physics community. Particle physicists have been focusing their attention 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 November.

Timing points to December
The 21-nation CERN's ruling Council meets from Dec. 12 to 16, and any concrete sign of the Higgs ? whose existence was postulated four decades ago by British scientist Peter Higgs ? could be reported during that session.

But 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."

"It might be that it does not even exist," she said, a possibility already raised by other researchers and by CERN chief Rolf Heuer.

This echoed comments by Columbia University mathematical physicist Peter Woit last weekend on his Not Even Wrong blog. "It seems not impossible that the results available (publicly or not...) mid-December will come within striking distance of ruling out the Higgs (at 90 pct or 95 pct level) over the relevant low mass range," Woit wrote.

The particle is part of the decades-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 has not yet been determined experimentally.

If it is not found, said Gagnon, "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.

For more about the search for the Higgs boson, check out msnbc.com's special report on the "Big Bang Machine."

Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45422811/ns/technology_and_science-science/

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