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Higgs boson: does anyone still doubt it?
Last December, the LHC experiments from CERN looking for the Higgs boson announced some pretty promising evidence that they had started to see it, and had measured its mass-energy at about 125 GeV. It wasn't clear enough to claim a true "discovery" yet, but it was promising. Today, scientists from Fermilab presented analysis of some of the last data collected before the Tevatron shut down (along with some improved analysis of their years of previous data), and they found evidence consistent with what the LHC saw. It's not as strong as the LHC signal was, but that's expected because their accelerator isn't as powerful. But the fact that two entirely separate machines have produced results that agree is an awfully good sign that this is the real thing. If you want to read some details, I heard about this from blog posts here and here.
The worrisome thing right now is that we're awfully close to the "nightmare" scenario for data from the LHC: finding the Higgs but not finding any evidence at all of physics beyond the Standard Model. All of the searches for things like extra dimensions and supersymmetry have thus far found nothing, even though the most natural supersymmetry models would quite likely have started to give strong hints by now. (Those ideas all have lots of variations and thus aren't remotely close to being ruled out yet, but it's getting harder to believe in the variations that got people excited about them in the first place.) If we find the Higgs, then that means the Standard Model is complete and internally consistent... as far as it goes. But we also know that the Standard Model can't be the whole story: its math simply isn't capable of being a "final" theory of nature. (For example, on its own it predicts effects that would make us measure the Higgs mass to be infinite! And of course it's ultimately incapable of coexisting with a universe that contains gravity, but that's true of any quantum field theory.) So it would be Really Unpleasant to have (on some level) finished studying the particle physics that we've already known for thirty years without the slightest hint of what the next step ought to be.
But still: finding the Higgs is really exciting, and there's plenty of time to worry about future prospects later.
The worrisome thing right now is that we're awfully close to the "nightmare" scenario for data from the LHC: finding the Higgs but not finding any evidence at all of physics beyond the Standard Model. All of the searches for things like extra dimensions and supersymmetry have thus far found nothing, even though the most natural supersymmetry models would quite likely have started to give strong hints by now. (Those ideas all have lots of variations and thus aren't remotely close to being ruled out yet, but it's getting harder to believe in the variations that got people excited about them in the first place.) If we find the Higgs, then that means the Standard Model is complete and internally consistent... as far as it goes. But we also know that the Standard Model can't be the whole story: its math simply isn't capable of being a "final" theory of nature. (For example, on its own it predicts effects that would make us measure the Higgs mass to be infinite! And of course it's ultimately incapable of coexisting with a universe that contains gravity, but that's true of any quantum field theory.) So it would be Really Unpleasant to have (on some level) finished studying the particle physics that we've already known for thirty years without the slightest hint of what the next step ought to be.
But still: finding the Higgs is really exciting, and there's plenty of time to worry about future prospects later.
Thanks!
--Beth
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