When CERN announced last year that they had discovered the Higgs Boson they captured the public’s’ imagination. With it’s monumental nickname as the “God Particle,” and its impressive origins, CERN had found the particle by smashing together tiny particles in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the Higgs Boson became a particle physics celebrity.
Now, researchers from the Centre for Cosmology and Particle Physics Phenomenology, Department of Physics, Chemistry and Pharmacy based at the University of Southern Denmark have published a paper questioning the scientific data collected by the CERN particle accelerator.
Mads Toudal Frandsen, an associate professor at the University of Southern Denmark, says it still remains possible that the CERN data could be explained by the presence of the Higgs particle. However, he also believes there are “… other explanations, we would also get this data from other particles.”
Frandsen and colleagues claim the data is not accurate enough to confirm whether CERN has truly discovered the Higgs particle.
On this basis, the researchers say it is possible the data is actually proof of the existence of the techni-higgs particle.
Frandsen said, “The current data is not precise enough to determine exactly what the particle is,” and that “It could be a number of other known particles.”
Peter Higgs and Francois Englert were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013(Reuters)
Although the techni-higgs particle and Higgs particle can easily be confused in experiments, they are two very different particles belonging to two very different theories of how the universe was created, researchers said.
The Higgs particle is the missing piece in the theory called the Standard Model. This theory describes three of the four forces of nature.
“A techni-higgs particle is not an elementary particle. Instead, it consists of so-called techni-quarks, which we believe are elementary,” Frandsen explained. “Techni-quarks may bind together in various ways to form for instance techni-higgs particles, while other combinations may form dark matter,” continued Frandsen in his press release. “We therefore expect to find several different particles at the LHC, all built by techni-quarks.”[
Frandsen believes further research is required to definitively establish whether physicists have indeed discovered the Higgs particle. With the LHC currently undergoing an overhaul, Frandsen hopes CERN researchers will soon have the power to identify these so-called techni-quarks.
•Abstract of Study: http://goo.gl/zVnEGn.
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