Higgs boson discovery deflates

Last updated 13:05 16/11/2012

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A new elementary particle whose discovery was announced with fanfare to a waiting world in July may be a little less exciting than scientists had hoped.

Reporting on a conference in Kyoto where the latest data from their Large Hadron Collider was presented, scientists at the Cern European research centre said on Thursday it seemed very likely that the particle was indeed the long-sought Higgs boson, which gives mass to matter.

But rather than an exotic beast opening the door to new realms of cosmology as some had hoped, the data increasingly suggests it is a ‘Standard Model Higgs’ fitting into the current scientific concept of the universe, they asserted.


Oliver Buchmueller, of the rival, but parallel CMS experiment, told Reuters "the evidence for it being the Higgs gets stronger and stronger as we go along".







Super-symmetry could theoretically account for the dark matter believed to make up nearly 25 per cent of the known universe - of which no more than five per cent is visible. But no sign of that has come so far, the reports from Kyoto say.

However, the Cern scientists have not given up hope that something more exotic might emerge.


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- Reuters

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