The Higgs boson was discovered a decade ago. Physicists are still excited about what it can tell us.
“Finding a particle, it sounds like the end of something, but it’s really only the beginning,” says experimental particle physicist María Cepeda of CIEMAT in Madrid, a member of the CMS collaboration.The standard model of particle physics explains the known elementary particles and their interactions. It consists of 17 particles, many of which have antiparticle partners. The fermions, or matter particles, include six types of quarks and six leptons .
Even if unknown particles are too heavy to show up at the LHC, the Higgs couplings could reveal their existence. “Any of these couplings not being what you expect them to be is a very clear sign of incredibly interesting new physics behind it,” says particle physicist Marumi Kado of Sapienza University of Rome and CERN, who is the deputy spokesperson for the ATLAS collaboration.
So far, the Higgs has conformed to the standard model. “The big thing we discovered is it looks pretty much like we expected it to. There have been no big surprises,” says theoretical particle physicist Sally Dawson of Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y.
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