Been slacking of late visiting massassi although this was the first post that caught my eye
Not a lot more to say really, a new boson has been seen, it fits, although not perfectly, a standard model higgs.
With it's mass being something on the low side, ~126 GeV, it keeps the door open to
supersymmetry, so for every particle there is a "super-symmetric" partner, which beens we haven't seen any of them yet, they are likely to be super massive and great candidates for dark matter.
I personally was hoping the Higgs would never be found, it would have made stuff far far more interesting, but in the end CERN spotted a new boson in the region that fits a Higgs, but in some ways it's a "good" Higgs to find.
There is a lot more to look into yet, I can't quite remember the decay-channel that was mentioned by the CMS chap, but there is a deficiency of signal in a channel they would expect to see it in, that needs investigating and finding out why. Understanding this new boson and checking that it's properties match that predicted is still not an easy task to accomplish, you really need to understand the detection of the decay products to be able to start measuring spin (or lack thereof for the Higgs), CP violation (there should be none if I remember correctly), so some hard ole work to be done.
And if it all fits with the initial estimates, then dark matter, ie SUSY particles will be next on the target and hopefully within range of what the LHC can produce, which considering it was designed to run at 14 TeV and still is only at 10 TeV, there is more to come.
It was a really good a day and what's even better, my name is on the damn author list
, along with many many many others I should add, but still....friggin yay!!
...poo