Fermilab denies it's found 'God particle'

Posted by Emma Woollacott


Physicist Tommaso Dorigo suggested last week in a blog post that the lab had discovered a Higgs effect.



Meanwhile, Lubos Motl says he's heard the same thing from a prominent physicist.

"I've heard that there's a rumor going around Aspen that the Tevatron will be announcing discovery of gluon + b → b + Higgs, which would then require large tan(beta), which would fit the MSSM. I guess we'll find out in a couple of weeks," he quotes the physicist as saying.

The Higgs boson is predicted to exist by the Standard Model of particle physics - but is the only particle postulated by that theory that has never been observed. If it exists, it could explain the existence of mass.

Fermilab is denying the story. "Let's settle this: the rumors spread by one fame-seeking blogger are just rumors. That's it," it says in a tweet.

But the denial stops short of saying categorically that no evidence for the particle has been found. A definitive answer one way or the other is likely to emerge next week at the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Paris.