New particles that mimic the long-sought Higgs boson may bamboozle physicists, who could spend years trying to confirm or rule out the possibility of an impostor, a new study warns.
The standard model of particle physics predicts that a particle called the Higgs boson endows many other particles with mass. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, was built in part to detect and study it for the first time.
Higgs bosons should be produced in the wreckage of collisions between pairs of protons smashed together at the LHC. While the Higgs will not be detected directly, it should quickly decay into more familiar particles, such as pairs of photons or heavy Z bosons, carriers of the weak nuclear force. The standard model of particle physics predicts what fraction of the occasions the Higgs should decay into each type of particle, so if decay products are seen in those ratios, we might assume we have finally found the Higgs.
But some other undiscovered particle could decay in the same pattern, say Patrick Fox of Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, and colleagues, in a paper posted online (arxiv.org/abs/1104.5450). "This was a surprisingly easy thing to arrange," says team member Neal Weiner of New York University, as such mimicry could occur as a result of a quantum phenomenon called mixing. Mixing allows particles to exist as a blend of two different types, and is known to occur between types of quark and between types of neutrino. If there is a new particle that mixes with the Higgs boson, it will pick up some characteristics of the Higgs.
"This is Mr. Higgs.""I know Higgs, and you not him."
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