DENVER — The discovery of the Higgs boson is real. But physicists are cagey about whether the new particle they've found will fit their predictions or not. So far, the data suggest that the Higgs, the particle thought to explain how other particles get their mass, is not presenting any surprises, physicists said here Saturday at the April meeting of the American Physical Society. But that doesn't mean that it won't in the future — or that there might not be other Higgs bosons lurking out there. "There's a large number of theoretical models that predict, actually, that this Higgs field is more complicated," said Markus Klute, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Some of these theories predict five or more Higgs bosons of different masses, Klute told reporters. [The Top 5 Implications of Finding the Higgs] This "vanilla" Higgs has been something of a disappointment to physicists hoping to find something that would upend their theories. "Sometime in November, I was depressed a little bit by the fact that everything lines up so well," Klute said. "They call this 'post-discovery depression.'" But researchers say there's more to learn about the Higgs, including whether it's the only one. It's possible that when the Large Hadron Collider revs up again in 2015 with more power, scientists may be able to detect heavier variations of the Higgs boson. Or variations may be hiding in the data collected already. "As far as 'Is the Higgs standard or not standard,' we're not in the game yet," said Michael Peskin, a physicists at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University. "We will be in the game later this decade, but right now it's just an open question." A secondary spike in Higgs data presented in December 2012 led to speculation that physicists had perhaps found a second Higgs boson of a different mass. However, that spike showed up in only one LHC experiment. Other lines of evidence produced at the collider have failed to show similar anomalies. http://science.nbcnews.com/_news/20...sts-debate-new-particle?lite&ocid=msnhp&pos=6
Sounds like NBC dug up some old news. Anyway we'll have to wait til 2015 for new results. CERN's quite lucky to have found the Higgs just before the worse of the EU financial crisis. Any later and their upgrade might've been delayed by a much longer period of time.
