There are so new indications that the Higgs particle (the "God particle") may not be found where we are looking with the Large Hadron Collider. A team of researchers have been looking over a collection of data that indirectly puts bounds on the mass of the top quark has been able to use that data to make some predictions about the mass of the Higgs.
"'The new results may be an indication that the Higgs boson has different properties than the Standard Model indicates,' Kehoe says. 'It's very difficult to devise a theory without some mechanism that mimics fairly well the Higgs mechanism. But if the underlying cause of this mechanism is significantly different, that will have a major impact on the fundamentals of the Standard Model. It could point to something deeper than the standard Higgs boson at work, and that is very interesting.'The measured value of the top quark mass may even go beyond constraining the standard Higgs. It may suggest that our current understanding of the Higgs is not correct, he says.
If the Higgs does not show up where the constraints indicate, the top measurement may force consideration of new theoretical possibilities that lie outside the existing Standard Model, Kehoe says."
From here.
All of which is pretty neat. The Higgs particle is the proposed gauge particle which would link gravitational "charge" to inertial mass. If it exists, it would explain the mechanism of the equivalence principle and would be the capstone on the Standard Model of Field Theory.
If it's not found where it's supposed to be, then that means there will be a whole sack full of Nobel prizes for physicists to claim.
I'm just can't decide which outcome to root for...
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