The New Higgs-Like Particle is Raising More Questions Than Experimenters Can Answer. (August 11, 2012)

Freelance writer Brad Hooker writing for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) discusses "Science in the era of the Higgs boson". Below is an excerpt from the conclusion of his blog:

Today the new Higgs-like particle is ...raising more questions than experimenters can answer.

“The [Higgs] question has been for a long time the most urgent one in particle physics and we’re really close to getting an answer to it,” says Quigg [Chris Quigg, a theoretical physicist at Fermilab]. With the discovery of this particle, scientists are now “very hungry to find out exactly what it is, how it behaves, how it decays.”

Why doesn’t the Higgs mass keep growing? The way this boson couples to itself somehow prevents that. More theories beyond the Standard Model are needed. Is it Supersymmetry? This theory that every particle has a superpartner may help explain a type of Higgs boson yet to be discovered, but so far this is not that particle. The answer to what the particle actually is will come in time with more data.

“We know that the Standard Model isn’t the whole story and we’ll have to work really hard to find physics beyond the Standard Model,” says AAAS fellow Joel Butler, manager of the U.S. CMS program at Fermilab. The Illinois laboratory funnels data delivered online from the CMS detector to a room warm and buzzing with the sound of supercomputers that are grinding this raw information through complex algorithms in order to pluck out any new physics.

In the last two years, the four LHC experiments have captured and analyzed about 800 trillion proton collisions. Several planned upgrades over the years will double the accelerator’s energy, boost luminosity—in a sense, the number of protons injected into the collisions—and release a river of data for scientists to analyze for decades to come.

“There’s a tremendous program if the Higgs exists,” says Butler. “It’s really not the end of the story. It’s the beginning of the story.”