Monday, August 29, 2011

No Higgs Boson

The latest from CERN:
Results from the ATLAS and CMS collaborations, presented at the biennial Lepton-Photon conference in Mumbai, India today, show that the elusive Higgs particle, if it exists, is running out of places to hide. Proving or disproving the existence the Higgs boson, which was postulated in the 1960s as part of a mechanism that would confer mass on fundamental particles, is among the main goals of the LHC scientific programme. ATLAS and CMS have excluded the existence of a Higgs over most of the mass region 145 to 466 GeV with 95 percent certainty.
As of now we seem to be down one theory, and still don't know why things have mass. There are other models, but they are less elegant than the Higgs field and very few physicists like any of them very much. The mystery remains.

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