CERN may not have discovered elusive Higgs Boson: study

LONDON: The elusive Higgs boson may not have been discovered despite claims of it being detected last year, according to a new study.

Many calculations indicate that the particle discovered last year in the CERN particle accelerator in Switzerland was indeed the famous Higgs particle.

Physicists agree that the CERN experiments did find a new particle that had never been seen before, but according to an international research team, there is no conclusive evidence that the particle was indeed the Higgs particle.

The research team has scrutinised the existing scientific data from CERN about the newfound particle and published their analysis in the journal Physical Review D.

"The CERN data is generally taken as evidence that the particle is the Higgs particle. It is true that the Higgs particle can explain the data but there can be other explanations, we would also get this data from other particles," said Mads Toudal Frandsen, associate professor at the Centre for Cosmology and Particle Physics Phenomenology, Department of Physics, Chemistry and Pharmacy at the University of Southern Denmark.

The researchers' analysis does not debunk the possibility that CERN has discovered the Higgs particle. That is still possible - but it is equally possible that it is a different kind of particle.

"The current data is not precise enough to determine exactly what the particle is. It could be a number of other known particles," said Frandsen.

"We believe that it may be a so-called techni-higgs particle. This particle is in some ways similar to the Higgs particle - hence half of the name," Frandsen added.

Although the techni-higgs particle and Higgs particle can easily be confused in experiments, they are two very different particles belonging to two very different theories of how the universe was created, researchers said.

The Higgs particle is the missing piece in the theory called the Standard Model. This theory describes three of the four forces of nature.

"A techni-higgs particle is not an elementary particle. Instead, it consists of so-called techni-quarks, which we believe are elementary.

"Techni-quarks may bind together in various ways to form for instance techni-higgs particles, while other combinations may form dark matter. We therefore expect to find several different particles at the LHC, all built by techni-quarks," said Frandsen.

If techni-quarks exist, there must be a force to bind them together so that they can form particles. None of the four known forces of nature (gravity, the electromagnetic force, the weak nuclear force and the strong nuclear force) are any good at binding techni-quarks together.

There must therefore be a yet undiscovered force of nature. This force is called the the technicolor force, researchers said.