Physicists speaking today at the Moriond conference in La Thuile, Italy, have announced that the new particle discovered at CERN last year is looking more and more like a Higgs boson. However, more analysis is still required before a definitive statement can be made. The key to a positive identification of the particle is a detailed analysis of its properties and the way that it interacts with other particles. Since the announcement last July, much more data has been analysed, and these properties are becoming clearer.

The key property that will allow us to say whether or not it is a Higgs particle is called spin. If this particle has spin-zero, then it is a Higgs particle. If not, then it is something different, possibly linked to the way gravity works. All the analysis conducted so far strongly indicates spin-zero, but is not yet able to rule out entirely the possibility that the particle has spin-two.

Last July scientists with the world's largest atom smasher, the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider on the Swiss-French border, announced finding a particle they described as Higgs-like, but wouldn't say it was conclusively the particle. Now thousands of checks show them even closer.

"It looks more and more like a Higgs boson," said Gagnon after an update presented Wednesday at a conference in the Italian Alps.

Gagnon compared finding the Higgs to identifying a specific person. This looks, talks, and sings like a Higgs, but scientists want to make sure it dances like the Higgs before they shout "Eureka."

She said there is only one last thing the particle they found could also be: a graviton. That's another subatomic particle associated with gravitational fields, not mass.

By checking the spin of the particle, scientists will be able to tell if it is a Higgs boson, which is far more likely, or a graviton. If it has no internal spin, it's the Higgs boson; if it has a lot of spin it's a graviton.

Originally posted by 35Foxtrot
reply to post by DarkSecret

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OK, that's cool. I didn't know that HB manipulation could lead to that. So, yeah, FTl trumps anything I was thinking of, like ( to answer the other poster who asked me ) reactionless type propulsion, "inertial dampeners" like in all sci-Fi stories so that graviton drive wouldn't crush us into jelly when we really got up there in the acceleration dept., artificial gravity on spaceships to cancel out the negative effects of low-g on long trips, a really comfortable adjustable-g bed, Etc...

Originally posted by Aleister
reply to post by DarkSecret

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I'm probably out of the loop on this topic, but that's the first I've read the term "de-Higgs". You make a good case for the best-possible-result potential of this discovery.

Originally posted by DarkSecret

Originally posted by Aleister
reply to post by DarkSecret

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I'm probably out of the loop on this topic, but that's the first I've read the term "de-Higgs". You make a good case for the best-possible-result potential of this discovery.

I just came up with "de-Higgs" just sounds so natural

I think a probe the size of a water bottle which would contain a camera and the computer plus something much bigger as a power source would be what we'll send. Although I'm assuming we will have to wait the full round trip of light to the nearest star until we can get the radio waves back... because information can't travel FTL even if our probe does - or it would create a paradox.