Higgs Boson decay opens new doors for particle physics

The Higgs Boson particle found at LHC in 2012 has now been found to decay into a matter-antimatter pair of bottom Quarks. A new announcement reveals.

If you’ve been a science fan for the last few years, you’re aware of the exciting results to emerge from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which in 2012 found the Higgs boson, the subatomic particle responsible for giving mass to fundamental subatomic particles. Today, physicists have another exciting announcement to add to the Higgs saga: They have made the first unambiguous observation of Higgs bosons decaying into a matter-antimatter pair of bottom quarks. Surprisingly, the Higgs bosons decay most often in this way.

In the 1960s, researchers were investigating linkages between the force of electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force, which is responsible for some types of radioactive decays. Although the two forces seemed distinct, it turned out that they both arose from a common and more fundamental force, now called the electroweak force. However, there was a problem. The simplest manifestation of the theory predicted that all particles had zero mass. Even in the 1960s, physicists knew that subatomic particles had mass, so that was potentially a fatal flaw. Several groups of scientists proposed a solution to this problem: A field permeates the universe, and it's called the Higgs field. Fundamental subatomic particles interacted with this field, and this interaction gave them their mass. [6 Implications of Finding the Higgs Boson] The existence of the field also implied the existence of a subatomic particle, called the Higgs boson, which was finally discovered in 2012 by researchers working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research(CERN) laboratory in Switzerland. (Disclosure: I am a collaborator on one of the research groups that made the initial discovery as well as today’s announcement.) For their predictions of the Higgs field, British physicist Peter Higgs and Belgian physicist François Englert shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in physics.

Higgs bosons are made in high-energy collisions between pairs of particles that have been accelerated to nearly the speed of light. These bosons don’t live for very long — only about 10^minus 22 seconds. A particle with that lifetime, traveling at the speed of light, will decay long before it travels a distance the size of an atom. Thus, it is impossible to directly observe Higgs bosons. It is only possible to observe their decay products and use them to infer the properties of the parent boson. Higgs bosons have a mass of 125 gigaelectron volts (GeV), or one that's about 133 times heavier than a proton. Calculations from well-established theory predicts thatHiggs bosonsdecay into pairs of the following particles in the following percentages: bottom quarks (58 percent), W bosons (21 percent), Z bosons (6 percent), tau leptons (2.6 percent) and photons (0.2 percent). More exotic configurations make up the remainder. One of the key results of today’s announcement was to verify that the prediction was correct for bottom quarks. [Strange Quarks and Muons, Oh My! Nature's Tiniest Particles Dissected]

Read full article www.livescience.com...

The LHC will continue to operate through early December. Then it will pause operations for two years for refurbishing and upgrades. In the Spring of 2021, it will resume operations with considerably enhanced capabilities.

More here news.fnal.gov...

I heard about it two, three days ago and the physicist was a bit disappointed, because this did NOT open new doors to advanced physics giving better explanations about dark matter, inflation etc.

It hit the expected values to such great sigmas that there is even less space for new physics than before. This kind of disappointment, when you just can't explore new discoveries.

lets assume I'm a cynical troll , so what else does the HigGs-boson do besides decaying into quarks and generating nobel-prise winners. I mean I love to have an anti-gravity hat.

originally posted by: frenchfries
lets assume I'm a cynical troll

, so what else does the HigGs-boson do besides decaying into quarks and generating nobel-prise winners. I mean I love to have an anti-gravity hat.

The Higgs Boson is an excitation of the Higgs field. The Higgs field gives particles( interacting with it) mass. So it's kind of a big deal.

a reply to: ManFromEurope

I thought the announcement was cool. And, hopefully with new discoveries after the refurb of LHC in 2021. It was a positive announcement.

Can you please link this disappointing information so we can have a better view of the OP.

It's not that long ago when the Higgs Boson was only theory. Some scientists even betting on weather it would ever be discovered.

Six years later. They seem to know a lot more.

Maybe explanations for dark matter and cosmic inflation are a bit like clutching at straws right now.

I hope for positive results in the future.

originally posted by: frenchfries
lets assume I'm a cynical troll

, so what else does the HigGs-boson do besides decaying into quarks and generating nobel-prise winners. I mean I love to have an anti-gravity hat.

As moebius rightly said. It is said to give mass to particles.

originally posted by: blackcrowe
a reply to: ManFromEurope

I thought the announcement was cool. And, hopefully with new discoveries after the refurb of LHC in 2021. It was a positive announcement.

Can you please link this disappointing information so we can have a better view of the OP.

It's not that long ago when the Higgs Boson was only theory. Some scientists even betting on weather it would ever be discovered.

Six years later. They seem to know a lot more.

Maybe explanations for dark matter and cosmic inflation are a bit like clutching at straws right now.

I hope for positive results in the future.

IT IS a positive discovery, indeed!

Marvellous, fantastic use of Machine Learning, but they had hopes to find that it DID NOT fit the predictions.

New Higgs Results Bring Relief and Disappointment (Scientific American)

a reply to: blackcrowe

Still trolling So how do you control a higgs-boson ? Could we make some cool stuff with it or is it just like the OMG particle. Cool to know , but real world implementations for it except for the beautifull tunes it makes

originally posted by: ManFromEurope
I heard about it two, three days ago and the physicist was a bit disappointed, because this did NOT open new doors to advanced physics giving better explanations about dark matter, inflation etc.

It hit the expected values to such great sigmas that there is even less space for new physics than before. This kind of disappointment, when you just can't explore new discoveries.

There are still some suspicions on the top quarks. They decay into a variety of sub-atomic particles including neutrinos, which can't be detected. It may be that there are other particles above top quarks.

physicstoday.scitation.org...

"For some combinations of top-quark and Higgs-boson masses, as shown in figure 6, the potential minimum in which the Higgs field currently sits is not the absolute minimum of the potential, and quantum tunneling to a lower-energy state is permitted. In such cases, particle physicists speak of the metastability of the electroweak vacuum; the universe is in a state that may endure for a very long time, but not forever. The Higgs field may have been primordially trapped at that metastable minimum; if so, it may be responsible for another subtlety of the universe that seems to be indicated by astronomical data: cosmic inflation, a sudden expansion of space in the infancy of the universe"

physics.aps.org...

originally posted by: frenchfries
a reply to: blackcrowe

Still trolling

So how do you control a higgs-boson ? Could we make some cool stuff with it or is it just like the OMG particle. Cool to know , but real world implementations for it except for the beautifull tunes it makes

The Higgs Boson was the God Particle. They only called it that, because it was so hard to find. The larger the particles, the shorter their life span - something like 10^-27 seconds. They don't even travel more than a few millimeters after a particle anti-particle collision.

originally posted by: frenchfries
a reply to: blackcrowe

Still trolling

So how do you control a higgs-boson ? Could we make some cool stuff with it or is it just like the OMG particle. Cool to know , but real world implementations for it except for the beautifull tunes it makes

The Higgs Boson was the God Particle. They only called it that, because it was so hard to find. The larger the particles, the shorter their life span - something like 10^-27 seconds. They don't even travel more than a few millimeters after a particle anti-particle collision.

originally posted by: frenchfries
a reply to: blackcrowe

Still trolling

So how do you control a higgs-boson ? Could we make some cool stuff with it or is it just like the OMG particle. Cool to know , but real world implementations for it except for the beautifull tunes it makes

The Higgs Boson was the God Particle. They only called it that, because it was so hard to find. The larger the particles, the shorter their life span - something like 10^-27 seconds. They don't even travel more than a few millimeters after a particle anti-particle collision.

originally posted by: frenchfries
a reply to: blackcrowe

Still trolling

So how do you control a higgs-boson ? Could we make some cool stuff with it or is it just like the OMG particle. Cool to know , but real world implementations for it except for the beautifull tunes it makes

The Higgs Boson was the God Particle. They only called it that, because it was so hard to find. The larger the particles, the shorter their life span - something like 10^-27 seconds. They don't even travel more than a few millimeters after a particle anti-particle collision.

a reply to: frenchfries

Interesting musical interpretation. Thanks.

Could we make some cool stuff with it

It gives mass. Which makes cool stuff.

a reply to: blackcrowe
I read the article several times and I still don't know what the title means by "Higgs Boson decay opens new doors for particle physics".

Exactly what new doors for particle physics did it open? I can't find in the article anything to support that. Instead the article makes it sound like there is just more data and better observations to confirm existing models. In fact it doesn't say "closing doors" but this quote from the article is more suggestive of that:

"They have made the first unambiguous observation of Higgs bosons decaying into a matter-antimatter pair of bottom quarks. Surprisingly, the Higgs bosons decay most often in this way."

Why is that surprising, since that matches predictions according to the next sentence?

"The new announcement shows a strong agreement between the theoretical predictions and the experimental data, which could in turn set strict constraints on ideas of more fundamental physics that strive to explain why the Higgs boson even exists."

Maybe it's some kind of clickbait title, since the actual real title would probably sound too boring, like "more Higgs boson data is consistent with existing models".

originally posted by: stormcell

originally posted by: ManFromEurope
I heard about it two, three days ago and the physicist was a bit disappointed, because this did NOT open new doors to advanced physics giving better explanations about dark matter, inflation etc.

It hit the expected values to such great sigmas that there is even less space for new physics than before. This kind of disappointment, when you just can't explore new discoveries.

There are still some suspicions on the top quarks. They decay into a variety of sub-atomic particles including neutrinos, which can't be detected. It may be that there are other particles above top quarks.

physicstoday.scitation.org...

"For some combinations of top-quark and Higgs-boson masses, as shown in figure 6, the potential minimum in which the Higgs field currently sits is not the absolute minimum of the potential, and quantum tunneling to a lower-energy state is permitted. In such cases, particle physicists speak of the metastability of the electroweak vacuum; the universe is in a state that may endure for a very long time, but not forever. The Higgs field may have been primordially trapped at that metastable minimum; if so, it may be responsible for another subtlety of the universe that seems to be indicated by astronomical data: cosmic inflation, a sudden expansion of space in the infancy of the universe"

physics.aps.org...

Those are interesting articles, but neither of them is about the observation of Higgs bosons decaying into a matter-antimatter pair of bottom quarks, which is the subject of the OP, as far as I can tell. That physicstoday article is far more interesting to me than the article cited in the OP.

a reply to: ManFromEurope

Thanks for the link.

And that’s also not to say the new results lack intrigue. In July, physicists found that the Higgs decays into two photons slightly more often than it was expected to. Could this have been a hint of new physics? Possibly.

Cool.

It could also just have been a statistical blip that would wash away in the coming flood of data.

Bugger.

but they had hopes to find that it DID NOT fit the predictions.

To be sure, these are still early days, and with time and data physicists could learn that the Higgs differs from Standard Model predictions, or even that there’s more than one Higgs to be found.

It's going to be a long wait.

a reply to: blackcrowe

ha yeah mass is cool , manipulating mass would be cooler ... , hope next time we find an elementary can vote for particle names.. Would be fun to name the Darkmatter particles, in the myriad of elemental particles that in the future will be discovered.

a reply to: stormcell

So Higgs was God... didn't know that.


Always thought OMG was a different particle than God particle. God not man nor woman , but a boson. Nice to know !
So In the beginning... there was a boson in an eventless spacetime.

Not to be confused with the "God Particle", the Higgs boson. The Oh-My-God particle was an ultra-high-energy cosmic ray detected on the evening of 15 October 1991 over Dugway Proving Ground, Utah, by the University of Utah's Fly's Eye Cosmic Ray Detector.[1][2] Its observation was a shock to astrophysicists (hence the name), who estimated its energy to be approximately 3×1020 eV or 3×108 TeV. This is 20000000 times more energetic than the highest energy measured in electromagnetic radiation emitted by an extragalactic object[3] and 1020 (100 quintillion) times the photon energy of visible light. The particle had a kinetic energy of 48 joules, equivalent to a 142-gram (5 oz) baseball travelling at about 26 m/s (94 km/h; 58 mph).

This might be a stupid question but……

I wonder-if the Highs field is able to give particles mass then is this the same as applying a spirit to a physical body...?

Through manipulation of the Highs field will scientists be able to apply spirits to bodies..? Maybe even bring people back to life...?

I think there is a prophecy that the dead would rise from their graves....

a reply to: Arbitrageur

Maybe it's some kind of clickbait title, since the actual real title would probably sound too boring, like "more Higgs boson data is consistent with existing models".

Maybe.

I shortened the title from the original by dropping "First-Ever Evidence of".

I didn't write or title the article.

Exactly what new doors for particle physics did it open? I can't find in the article anything to support that. Instead the article makes it sound like there is just more data and better observations to confirm existing models.

No new doors it seems.

But, Some better confirmation of existing models.

I only had the one article to go by. And. Was intrigued by it.

ManFromEurope had a different view too.

I thought the best course of action would be to ask him to post a link. So we/i can get a better understanding of my OP.

If you can share more. That would be great too.

I'm still learning. So all info is appreciated.