Higgs Boson Discovered

[Lamplighter]

There's always a spoil-sport in the crowd. This one is named Harvey Newman at Cal Tech...

Discovery News
Fri Jul 6, 2012 07:55 AM ET

What If the New Particle Isn't the Higgs Boson?
There are subtle indications that the particle may not, in fact, be the Higgs.

Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) say they've discovered
a new "Higgs-like" particle: a bundle of energy that has most of the trappings
of the long-sought Higgs boson. They're not naming the newcomer outright,
because there are subtle indications that the particle may not, in fact,
be the plain old Higgs itself, but rather a close doppelganger.<snip>

The Standard Model is incomplete, Newman said, because it doesn't account
for the particles that make up 84 percent of the matter in the universe:
the invisible substance known as dark matter. It also fails to incorporate gravity.<snip>
The leading theory that places the Standard Model within a more powerful,
all-encompassing framework is called supersymmetry, or SUSY.<snip>

When generated in a particle collider like the LHC, each Higgs-like boson
would be expected to decay into a unique set of lighter particles.
It appears that the newfound particle at the LHC decayed in a way
that the run-of-the-mill Standard Model Higgs would not have, the physicists said
— although more data is needed before they'll know for certain what kind of Higgs they've got.
But if the particle is, in fact, a more exotic Higgs, then it could be a SUSY Higgs,
or at least a non-Standard Model Higgs. And this would be the first
discovery of physics beyond the Standard Model.