Scientists haven't called it yet, but the particle they found is likely the Higgs boson

Mar 7, 2013 12:11 GMT  ·  By

The search for the Higgs boson continues, but the latest update from CERN scientists is that they're on the right track.

While the Large Hadron Collider is down for maintenance and upgrade and won't be operational again until 2015, scientists have mountains of data to sift through.

Last summer, teams from the two main experiments looking for the Higgs announced that they had discovered a particle that looked like the Higgs boson at around the 125 GeV level.

Their level of confidence on the existence and the mass of the particle was enough to call it a discovery, meaning something is definitely there.

But scientists weren't quick to call it the Higgs because they have to see if it has some of the other predicted properties of the Higgs boson, for example its spin.

The Higgs Boson, the Standard Model theory says, must have a spin of zero. In the latest update, scientists say that they are pretty sure that the particle they found has a spin of zero; however, they can't yet exclude the possibility that it has a spin of two.

Overall, the particle is looking more and more like the Higgs, which is great for the Standard Model, but the hope was perhaps that something unexpected will be found.

There are some other signs that things may not be as expected, which is what excites physicists, but more analysis is needed before anything can be said conclusively.

In fact, from the data so far, some of the more exotic theories and ideas are starting to look bad since the LHC found nothing where some of these ideas indicated "something" should be.

It's still possible that interesting discoveries will be made from the troves of data scientists have gathered so far, but the big hope is that the truly interesting stuff will come when the LHC starts running again at double its current maximum energy, 14 TeV, compared to 7 TeV now.