The Higgs boson is unique. Does it open a door to Dark Matter?
All known fundamental particles acquire mass by interacting with the Higgs boson. Actually, more correctly, they interact with a quantum field which is present even in “empty” space, and the Higgs boson itself is an “excitation” – a quantum ripple – in that field. Either way, what this means is that if you create a Higgs boson, it can and will decay, producing other particles, via those same interactions.
The annual UK particle physics and astroparticle physics conference was hosted by Imperial this week, and has just finished. Some slightly random highlights.
Goals (slide from the plenary talk by Chris McCabe, KCL)
EvidenceObservation: Another update from the arXiv – this went (well) over 5 sigma today (link to ATLAS paper at the bottom of the article).
Beams of light do not, generally speaking, bounce off each other like snooker balls. But at the high energies in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN they have just been observed doing exactly that
At the Guardian.
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This result is on the arXiv this morning (see link added).
I was earlier into work than usual this morning after talking about a new pentaquark discovered by LHCb and reported just now in the Moriond QCD meeting.
Even so, when I got in, Ryan was already there, well into his Noνa data taking shift.
After confusion and controversy on various experiments (including mine) over several years, LHCb reported the first solid observation of two pentaquark states in 2015. This result adds a third, and also reveals that one of the others may in fact be two, with slightly different masses.
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