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LHC 'has two years to find Higgs'

By T.K. Randall
March 2, 2011 · Comment icon

18 comments

Image Credit: Frank Hommes

Scientists expect to find the Higgs boson particle via the Large Hadron Collider by the end of 2012.

It is thought that if the particle is not found within that time frame then it is unlikely to exist at all and currently held views on physical laws will need to be changed. "If we don't see it after this two year run it means that something is perhaps not the way that we think it is, either the Higgs search itself had to be amended in some way or some of its indirect evidence may be pointing us in the wrong direction," says Professor Tom LeCompte.

If the collider does not detect the Higgs within two years, researchers say they will know that it does not exist - at least in the form required by the Standard Model, the framework which was devised to explain the behaviour of fundamental particles.

Source: BBC News | Comments (18)

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#9 Posted by sepulchrave 13 years ago

Hopefully :PsYKoTiC:BeHAvIoR: is just joking around. It is physically impossible for the LHC to cause any sort of atomic explosion. The total energy released in the largest collisions at the LHC are less than the energy released by dropping a tea cup onto the floor. Cryptozological Mascot, the LHC will not be a "waste of money" if they don't find the Higgs, any more than Fermilab was a "waste of money" since they didn't find the Higgs either. The LHC experiments will give a lot of information about some of the more exotic quark states, help verify the quark-gluon model for matter, and provide ... [More]

#10 Posted by OverSword 13 years ago

I've been reading about hyper-dimensional physics and regardless of them finding the "god" particle or not I believe they may have to rethink the generally accepted view of things soon. At one point it was perfectly reasonable to believe that the sun orbited the earth based on available evidence.

#11 Posted by Timonthy 13 years ago

At one point it was perfectly reasonable to believe that the sun orbited the earth based on available evidence. Just like depending on who you hung out with, light exhibited the properties of either waves or particles! Now both models are accepted but we'll do better than that sooner or later...

#12 Posted by Blizno 13 years ago

So if this "God" particle is found, what exactly will that mean for humanity in general? I haven't been following this in a while, can anybody catch me up real quick? Please, please, please let the "god" nonsense die. Some physicists were being clever when they coined the term "god particle". They knew that the particle has nothing to do with gods. Some people eager to find evidence of gods have been shouting the term "god particle" and claiming that its discovery will prove that gods exist. Of course the Higgs boson has nothing to do with gods. Scientific discoveries of the most basic aspects... [More]

#13 Posted by SpiderCyde 13 years ago

SpiderCyde, the Higg's boson will have no impact on Humanity in general at all, any more than the discovery of quarks had an impact on Humanity. The Higg's boson is a consequence of a predicted symmetry between the fundamental forces. The Higg's boson is not the force carrier for gravity (that would be the Graviton), but rather it a manifestation of the field (the Higg's field) that gives mass to particles. The theory behind the Higg's boson is (as far as I know) the simplest and most elegant theory which accounts for electro-weak symmetry breaking (i.e. the reason why photons - electromagneti... [More]

#14 Posted by :PsYKoTiC:BeHAvIoR: 13 years ago

Hopefully :PsYKoTiC:BeHAvIoR: is just joking around. It is physically impossible for the LHC to cause any sort of atomic explosion. The total energy released in the largest collisions at the LHC are less than the energy released by dropping a tea cup onto the floor. Yes and no. The word atomic is exagerated on my part. I saw footage of the Tsar bomb last week, so I've been visualising a bigger blast. While the actual collisions might be a small, the amount of stored energy per beam is 300 MJ (megajoules). 1 MJ is roughly equivalent to 3 sticks of dynamite. A human error can be catastrophic.

#15 Posted by sepulchrave 13 years ago

While the actual collisions might be a small, the amount of stored energy per beam is 300 MJ (megajoules). 1 MJ is roughly equivalent to 3 sticks of dynamite. Right. The predicted max beam energy is 362 MJ (see the "Beam Parameters" tab for a PDF). Let's double that to account for 2 beams colliding. The energy of 1 kg of TNT is 4.7 MJ. So two beams colliding could release a maximum energy equivalent to 154 kg of TNT. Which is about 8% of the total explosive weight carried by the WWII Heinkel He-111 which bombed Britain. I think Europe can withstand a 154 kg of TNT explosion. (That is 0.0000003... [More]

#16 Posted by Phox 13 years ago

#17 Posted by sepulchrave 13 years ago

Actually this Higgs Bison has a very large impact on Humanity. What would you think would happen if you remove Higgs Bison from a object? You create a massless and weightless object that means less energy is required to move it forward. This would have a huge impact on modes of transportation today on Earth. I assume you mean the ``Higg's boson''. A ``Higg's Bison'' would be a different object entirely. It also wouldn't work like that. Photons are the gauge bosons for electromagnetic fields, but removing a photon from, say, and electron doesn't get rid of the electron's charge. If the Higg's f... [More]

#18 Posted by Mycologist 13 years ago

"by the end of 2012" Did they have to even say it? lol Doomers are going to have a field day with that one..On a serious note though, does anyone have any idea what effects if any a large Solar X-flare hitting earth while these experiments are being conducted, would be? I know the last large one we had in the 1800s fried even single coated telegraph wires... and NASA warned us that the storm will peak at a much greater level than originally theorized due to some math error, and this storm peaks at the end of 2012 also... Just curious if anyone might have an idea of how that could impact such a... [More]

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