Standard Model

The science world is mourning the loss of British theoretical physicist, Peter Higgs who passed away at the age of 94. He was the namesake of the boson that was discovered in 2012. The Higgs boson was a crucial to the theoretical edifice that physicists built known as the standard model of particles and fields.

The ATLAS collaboration measured the W-boson width at the LHC for the first time. The W-boson width had previously been measured at CERN’s LEP collider and Fermilab’s Tevatron collider. This is the most precise measurement to date made by a single experiment, and—while a bit larger—it is consistent with the Standard-Model prediction to within 2.5 standard deviations.

The researchers identified the origin of discrepancies in recent predictions of the muon’s magnetic moment. Their findings could contribute to the investigation of dark matter and other aspects of the new physics.

From Popular Science, August 17, 2023: Breaking the Standard Model would be one of the biggest moments in particle physics history. The Muon g-2 collaboration reported that the muon doesn’t always look like physicists expect it to look, but the collaboration isn’t done. Once they analyze all the remaining data, physicists believe they can make their g minus 2 estimate twice as precise again.

From The Conversation, Aug. 10, 2023: The new results of the Muon g-2 experiment are summarized by a group of Postdocs from the University of Liverpool. The latest results examined four times as many muons as the 2021 result, cutting the total uncertainty by a factor of two. This makes the measurement the most precise determination of the muon’s wobble ever made on Muon g-2.

Scientists working on Fermilab’s Muon g-2 experiment released the world’s most precise measurement yet of the magnetic moment of the muon, bringing particle physics closer to the ultimate showdown between theory and experiment that may uncover new particles or forces.

A large number of scientists are working on improving the Standard Model prediction of the value of muon g-2 using new data and new lattice calculations. By measuring and calculating this number to ultra-high precision, scientists can test whether the Standard Model is complete.

A theory of everything was all the rage in the 1980s. So where did it go?

The ATLAS and CMS experiments have observed a process 4,000 times rarer than the production of Higgs bosons.

The Higgs boson is the only fundamental particle known to be scalar, meaning it has no quantum spin. This fact answers questions about our universe, but it also raises new ones.