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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