Higgs Boson Decays into Dark MAtter

[Quds Akbar]

I recently read this article about how the Higgs Boson could decay into Dark Matter particles. Why is this not being taken seriously, there must be something, and I am not a physicist, just a ninth grade student, so why is this either a good theory or bad theory?
Thanks in advance!
Here is the link:
http://news.discovery.com/space/the-higgs-boson-may-disintegrate-into-dark-matter-150203.htm

 

[BvU]

It's being taken seriously in the sense that the experimenters are on the lookout. But as you can read in the article, it's just a speculative shot in the dark. It's not excluded, but the likelihood is not big.

Good or bad is decided in the long term by experimental evidence that confirms theoretical predictions -- or refutes them. For some theories 'long term' can be quite a number of years (see the Higgs) and Peter Higgs was right. Supersymmetry is pretty resistant too, and string theory as well. Our 'Standard model' is also 'only' the best we have -- in this stage of human knowledge.

--

 

[Orodruin]

Why do you think it is not being taken seriously? Both ATLAS and CMS will look for the signal, that is about how serious you can be taken as a theorist without hard experimental evidence. In the end, only experiments will tell if it is viable or not.

Also, discovery.com is not a reliable source. The original paper is here http://arxiv.org/abs/1203.4563 and is published in JHEP.

 

[Chalnoth]

One difficulty with this kind of thing is that the LHC likely couldn't directly detect the dark matter particle. Such a particle would pass straight through the detectors, so it'd appear in the signal as missing mass. And that is extremely difficult to tease out of the data.

The problem is that the LHC collides protons, and when protons collide at high energies they produce a rather extreme mess. Here's a blog post that includes an image of one such reaction:
https://www.bnl.gov/rhic/news2/news.asp?a=2024&t=today

There are frequently more than a hundred particles that make it out, and many of those particles are never detected (e.g. neutrinos can pass straight through the detectors without interacting with anything). So they're not only looking for missing mass, but they have to model all of the mass that is expected to be missing from known particles, and look for a signal on top of that (a signal that may be very small indeed).

 

[Quds Akbar]

Why do you think it is not being taken seriously? Both ATLAS and CMS will look for the signal, that is about how serious you can be taken as a theorist without hard experimental evidence. In the end, only experiments will tell if it is viable or not.

Also, discovery.com is not a reliable source. The original paper is here http://arxiv.org/abs/1203.4563 and is published in JHEP.

Thank you, this will help me a lot.

 

[jamalkoiyess]

I am really passionate about the results ... it could solve a lot of ptoblems and answer lots of questions