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From here: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com...-scientists-found-two-different-higgs-bosons/
So how significant would this be if it turns out to be true? I wasn't aware that there had been predictions of more than one Higgs in the first place, but the article says there was.
Also:
What's the significance of this? I don't know much about particle decay.
Yesterday researchers at the Atlas experiment finally updated the two-photon results. What they seem to have found is bizarre—so bizarre, in fact, that physicists assume something must be wrong with it. Instead of one clean peak in the data, they have found [STRIKE]two [/STRIKE]an additional peak.* There seems to be a Higgs boson with a mass of 123.5 GeV (gigaelectron volts, the measuring unit that particle physicists most often use for mass), and another Higgs boson at 126.6 GeV—a statistically significant difference of nearly 3 GeV. Apparently, the Atlas scientists have spent the past month trying to figure out if they could be making a mistake in the data analysis, to little avail. Might there be two Higgs bosons?
So how significant would this be if it turns out to be true? I wasn't aware that there had been predictions of more than one Higgs in the first place, but the article says there was.
Also:
But let’s not let this intriguing blip distract us from the original scent of new physics. Back when the preliminary data seemed to show that the Higgs was decaying into two photons more often than it should, I wrote that it could be “a statistical blip that would wash away in the coming flood of data.” But more data has now arrived, and the blip hasn’t gone anywhere. The Higgs boson continues to appear to be decaying into two photons nearly twice as often as it should.
What's the significance of this? I don't know much about particle decay.