There’s less and less room for particle theory’s long-sought capstone to hide.
The Higgs boson is the only remaining undiscovered particle required by the standard model (SM) of particle theory. It’s the neutral, spinless quantum of the Higgs field, which serves to break the SM’s underlying symmetry between the electromagnetic and weak interactions. The field bestows mass on the spin-1 bosons that mediate the weak interaction, and on the quarks and leptons. The SM doesn’t predict the Higgs mass MH, but precision measurements of electroweak parameters and null results of searches at various colliders have restricted its range to 115–156 GeV. (The proton’s mass is about 1 GeV.) Now the ATLAS and CMS detector collaborations at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have reported tantalizing—but still statistically marginal—evidence of the Higgs near 125 GeV.
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