Higgs Boson Looks “Standard,” but Upgraded LHC May Tell a Different Tale
A new run at the Large Hadron Collider in 2015 could show whether the Higgs boson matches the Standard Model of particle physics or opens the door to new theories

6-26-2014 | Clara Moskowitz | Scientific American Associate Editor for Space & Physics

If it looks like a Higgs, and acts like a Higgs, it’s probably a standard Higgs boson. That’s the drift from the latest measurements at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), where physicists have been carefully characterizing the new particle they discovered in 2012. So far, every test at the Geneva accelerator confirms that the new particle closely resembles the Higgs boson described by the Standard Model of particle physics. These results resoundingly confirm the Higgs theory first put forward in 1964 by Robert Brout, François Englert and Peter Higgs—and helped win the latter two the Nobel prize last year. (Brout died in 2011, making him ineligible for the award.)

Scientists are eager to detect deviations from this idea, however, which might reveal a deeper layer of physics. For instance, if the Higgs boson decays to lighter particles at slightly different rates than predicted, it could indicate the presence of new, exotic particles interfering with those decays. Whereas the most recent results show no sign of such interference, the next phase of the LHC could offer new insights; it is set to start operating at higher energies in early 2015. At those energies, the Higgs boson may open the door to a new theory of physics that more fully explains the universe. “With the discovery of the Higgs boson we didn’t finish a quest, we actually started a whole new line of research,” says Paul Padley, a physicist at Rice University who works on the LHC’s Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment. “That’s going to be our job in the next decades, is studying this in great detail.”

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