Tom Straw
FOR half a century, finding the Higgs boson was top of particle physicists’ to-do lists. Its eventual discovery in 2012 was celebrated as the final piece of the puzzle to complete the “standard model”, our picture of reality at its most fundamental level. The Higgs became famous, a rare household name among elementary particles.
But now, almost a decade on, we still barely know the Higgs boson – and our understanding of the pantheon of particles and forces that makes the universe what it is remains manifestly imperfect. We were hoping that, alongside the Higgs, new particles and forces would reveal unexpected exotic phenomena and bring into focus an even bigger picture. Alas, the Higgs is behaving exactly as expected, undermining a notion that its unseen interactions would help us uncover new physics.
Is the Higgs as boring as it seems? Possibly not. Closer inspection could expose its true self, and the shadows of strange siblings or exotic “pink elephant” particles, any of which would shake up our understanding of the universe. We need to “get the Higgs on the table, dissect it, prod it, see where it starts to disagree”, says Ben Allanach, a particle physicist at the University of Cambridge.
With that in mind, many in the field are now pushing for a new particle collider to churn out Higgs bosons in industrial quantities, so we can interrogate it like never before. But will such a Higgs factory open doors to new physics? Or is the Higgs as mundane as it seems, which might itself tell us something about our ability to understand the universe?
The standard model…
