'God Particle' Might Really Be 5 God Particles

Fermilab experiment produces results standard physics can't explain
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Jun 17, 2010 8:01 AM CDT
'God Particle' Might Really Be 5 God Particles
Workmen install a tracking chamber at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill.    (AP Photo/Fermilab)

The Large Hadron Collider scientists searching for the Higgs boson "God particle" that explains the mysteries of the universe should be looking for five different particles, according to their rival atom-smashers in the US. Fermilab researchers in Illinois colliding protons and anti-protons found that the smashes yielded matter particles slightly more often than anti-matter particles, a phenomenon that could be explained by the existence of five kinds of Higgs bosons, the Telegraph reports.

The Higgs boson, under the Standard Model of physics, is what gives everything in the universe its mass. The Fermilab researchers say that the existence of five kinds of the particle doesn't fit into the Standard Model and their experiments suggest there are new, as yet undiscovered, kinds of physics out there. The matter-anti-matter discrepancy is "a really small effect, but it's still much bigger than if you turn all the cranks with all the original rules in the standard mode," a member of the Fermilab team tells National Geographic. (More Higgs boson stories.)

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