Everyone went crazy when CERN scientists announced the proof that the Higgs boson exists. It's theoretically known to give us mass and its the stuff that holds the Universe together. But other physicists are bringing down the party, saying CERN may have found an impostor and not the the actual particle itself.
After analyzing the data collected at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, scientists Ian Low, Joseph Lykken and Gabe Shaughnessy at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, claim that these observations may be explained by two other "impostor" particles:
We show that current LHC data already strongly disfavor both the dilatonic and non-dilatonic singlet imposters. On the other hand, a generic Higgs doublet and a triplet imposter give equally good fits to the measured event rates of the newly observed scalar resonance
Their research paper is available through Cornell University's Arxiv (PDF)—Low and his colleagues also add that, while the data may be explained by these two impostors, the "Standard Model Higgs boson gives a slightly better overall fit."If they are right, it means we'll have to wait a while more before we find evidence of the Higgs boson. And maybe Stephen Hawking can get his $100 back from the bet he made earlier.
CERN scientists claimed that they were 99.9999 percent sure that the measurements are the result of the existence of the Higgs boson, but there's always a slight chance that they could be wrong or that they may need to investigate further.
Joe Incandela, professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and head of the LHC's Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, didn't want to point at the Higgs boson just yet:
The results are preliminary but the 5 sigma signal at around 125 GeV we're seeing is dramatic. This is indeed a new particle. We know it must be a boson and it's the heaviest boson ever found. The implications are very significant and it is precisely for this reason that we must be extremely diligent in all of our studies and cross-checks.
Low and his colleagues conclude that we need to wait and get more information, since the data at this stage cannot completely demonstrate the existence of the God particle or even these impostors.[Arxiv via Technology Review]
