Higgs is so yesterday 鈥� dark matter is the new black. A new survey of about 50 particle theorists reveals mixed feelings about whether the long-sought Higgs boson will ever point the way to new theories, but renewed optimism that the mysterious stuff that makes up most of the universe鈥檚 matter will show us the way.
Physicists had high hopes for the Higgs boson. Its discovery last year at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland, filled in the missing piece of the standard model, physicists鈥� current best explanation of all the particles and forces in the known universe.
However, the standard model is still incomplete 鈥� it does not account for gravity, for example 鈥� so physicists hoped the Higgs would turn out to be weird enough to point the way to new theories.
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But further results from the LHC suggest the Higgs looks exactly as expected. 鈥淭he LHC has not found any trace of new physics,鈥� says Luis Ibanez of the Autonomous University of Madrid in Spain.
Losing hope
A new survey suggests that physicists are giving up hope for the Higgs. Last week Ibanez and his colleagues held a meeting to , and gave attendees an opinion poll to kick off the talks.
Of nearly 50 respondents, only 53 per cent believe the LHC or the next future collider will ever detect non-standard properties of the Higgs. Just 59 per cent were confident that the LHC would make any new discoveries now that the Higgs has been found.
鈥淭he data we have collected should be showing some of the signals that we might be able to see with more clarity later on,鈥� says Tommaso Dorigo of the CMS experiment at CERN, who has . 鈥淚f we don鈥檛 see anything now, that is a suggestion there might not be anything to see in the larger data sets.鈥�
Supersymmetry fading
One leading theory beyond the standard model is supersymmetry (SUSY), in which every particle has a much heavier partner, but so far the LHC has found no evidence supporting it. Only 24 per cent of physicists polled voted for SUSY as a solution to the hierarchy problem, which asks why the Higgs mass is vastly smaller than predicted by the standard model, a major mystery in particle physics.
鈥淧robably three or four years ago it would have been 50 per cent or more,鈥� says Ibanez. 鈥淭he absence of any other new thing is making us nervous, but there is nothing better than having actual data.鈥�
Perhaps that explains another result from the survey: a full 75 per cent expect we will detect dark matter, mysterious particles that interact with the rest of the universe only through gravity, within the next decade. 鈥淚 don鈥檛 understand why. I鈥檓 on the pessimistic side,鈥� says Ibanez. It is possible that theorists are pinning their hopes on the unknowns of dark matter rather than the known and troublesome Higgs, he says.
鈥淭he general perception is that there is dark matter,鈥� says Dorigo. 鈥淚t is not understood, but there is something to discover.鈥�
Of course, with just a small fraction of particle physicists represented in the survey, results must be taken with a pinch of salt. 鈥淭his kind of discussion gives ideas on what to pursue,鈥� says Ibanez, but he cautions that consensus is not necessarily the route to discovery. 鈥淪cience is not democratic. Very often the one who is correct is in a minority.鈥�
