Physicists May Have Accidentally Found Two Higgs Bosons Instead Of Just One

Physicists May Have Accidentally Found Two Higgs Bosons Instead Of Just One

Scientists at Cern who successfully found the Higgs Boson particle earlier this year might have accidentally found two.

According to data just released by researchers working at the Atlas and Large Hadron Collider experiments, there seem to be two Higgs Boson particles with extremely similar, but different, mass.

The results - which are intriguing although unconfirmed - have emerged out of an oddity in the original data which showed the particle, which put simply 'gives mass' to other particles, decaying into two photons more often than it should.

That data was studied in more detail, and the result seems to be that there really are two 'peaks' in the results, instead of just one.

What that means is there appears to be one Higgs Boson with a mass of 123.5 GeV (gigaelectron volts) and one with 126.6 GeV.

Scientific American explains that it has been thought before there might be more than one Higgs - but not so close together.

As a result, it's still possible that the results indicate a problem with the experiment, and not interesting physics at all.

Physicist Adam Falkowski wrote on his blog:

"In this case they most likely signal a systematic problem rather than some interesting physics. First and least, it would be quite a coincidence to have two Higgs particles so close in mass."

The researchers are still trying to find out what the cause of the strange results really is - but for now the possibility remains that the universe might still be even more ridiculous than it already appears to be.

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