Higgsteria rising as trouble brews for standard model

Excitement about the Higgs boson is ramping up ahead of a hotly anticipated conference in Australia next month. But even if last year's tentative signals of the particle are confirmed, a fresh analysis of data from a particle accelerator in California suggests that this may not complete the standard model of physics.

The Higgs boson is the missing piece of the standard model, our most successful description of how particles and forces interact. Last December, researchers at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, reported the most credible hints yet of the elusive particle.

Various bloggers claim these hints will grow less tentative once new data is revealed at the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Sydney.

Theoretical physicist Peter Woit of Columbia University in New York wrote on his blog that the LHC's two main experiments are seeing the same signal as in December ? hinting at a Higgs with an energy of 125 gigaelectronvolts ? but this time with greater statistical significance. Woit declined to name his sources but assured New Scientist they were "highly reliable".

Too many taus

Still, for now, those rumours are just that. "It is still too premature to start going wild," says Pauline Gagnon of CERN's ATLAS experiment.

In the meantime, a new analysis from the BaBar experiment, which ran at the SLAC National Accelerator Lab in California until 2008, suggests the standard model is not what it seems.

According to the model, a particle called the B meson, studied by BaBar, decays to produce particles including a W boson, which then decays further into a tau particle and a tau neutrino. Now BaBar reports B mesons decaying into tau particles more often than the standard model predicts.

"It looks like the standard model has something in it that we don't understand," says BaBar spokespersonman Michael Roney at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada.

The BaBar team's results are not statistically significant, yet, but they hope a Japanese experiment called Belle will confirm their results soon. If it is confirmed, the standard model may need a revamp, even if the Higgs is discovered to fit neatly into it.

Reference: arxiv.org/abs/arXiv:1205.5442

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