THE God particle has visited the blogosphere. In recent weeks, particle physicists at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, have been writing breathless blogs describing how they might have found the particle thought to give everything in the universe its mass 鈥� the Higgs boson. All are cautious: no claims of discovery are being made, but other physicists are speculating that what is being seen is significant.
John Conway and colleagues at Fermilab are looking beyond the standard model 鈥� the best description we have of fundamental particles and the interactions between them. Using the Tevatron accelerator, they are searching for a Higgs boson predicted by supersymmetry, a rival scheme which posits that every standard-model particle has a heavier 鈥渟uper-partner鈥�. Their research hints at a particle with a mass of about 160 gigaelectronvolts (see 鈥淕limpses of the God particle?鈥�).
Such signals have a habit of disappearing. In 1984, the Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia famously claimed that a blip seen at CERN, the European centre for particle physics near Geneva, was the top quark. And in the mid-1990s, researchers at Fermilab thought they had found the Higgs at 85 GeV. In 1997, physicists at the HERA experiment in Hamburg, Germany, thought they had detected a 鈥渓eptoquark鈥�. All these sightings came to nothing, so why should this latest blip warrant special attention? The simple reason is that it has been picked up not just by one research group, but by two.
Advertisement
Deciding its true significance will take time. Conway and colleagues have plenty more data to analyse. They are also narrowing their searches, looking for specific signatures in the way particles decay. Even so, it may still be two or three years before we discover if the supersymmetric Higgs is the real deal.
One intriguing question is what all this will mean for the Large Hadron Collider being built at CERN. After all, the LHC鈥檚 raison d鈥櫭猼re is to find the Higgs boson 鈥� at least, that鈥檚 what governments and the public have been told. The answer is clear. If a Higgs has been found that opens the door to supersymmetry then the LHC could be in for a particle bonanza: all those super-partners will have to be found.
Particle physicists must secretly be hoping this is the case. If the standard model is correct, all we have left to find is the Higgs boson. Once that is discovered, then what? Could the cost of building the International Linear Collider be justified? Probably not. No wonder then that the Fermilab signal is generating so much interest. Conway jokingly says it would be 鈥渏ob security for a lifetime鈥�. It also promises a more exciting future for physics.
