The idea that a preference in meson decays for matter over antimatter could point to a whole world of unseen particles, including multiple Higgs bosons, just got a blessing.
Physical Review Letters this week accepted a paper titled "CP violation in B_s mixing from heavy Higgs exchange", or in layman terms, "Supersymmetric Higgs bosons may tilt the matter-antimatter balance" . The paper should appear in the journal shortly. PRL is considered by many the top clearing house for original papers about particle physics results and theories. Acceptance in the journal means the paper passed review by peers in the field, akin to the peer review that occurs for doctors in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
symmetry wrote in "Could DZero result point to multiple Higgses?" on June 4 about the preprint of this paper, written by a trio of Fermilab theorists, before it had passed peer review.
The Higgs boson, whether one or many, is thought to exist as an energy-type field that imparts all other particles with their mass as they pass through it. Mass allows particles to join together to form the visible structures in the universe.
While this theory paper points out that a multiple Higgs scenerio is one of several possible interpretations of the May DZero asymmetry result, the multiple Higgs idea is what has piqued interest by media including a National Geographic "God Particle May Be Five Distinct Particles, New Evidence Shows" and a BBC article "US experiment hints at 'multiple God particles'." Nobel Prize winner Leon Lederman, a Fermilab physicist, dubbed the Higgs particle the "God Particle" in his book by the same name, though the moniker has limited acceptance within the academic physics world.
A plenary talk of this paper given at the Planck 2010International Conference held at CERN didn't draw criticism but the idea recently has drawn fire from physicist bloggers questioning the theory and the DZero result that it interprets. An excerpt from a June 18 update of the symmetry story that looked at the debate:
Complexity also breeds debate, and sometimes rumors. In particular, two rumors seem to have gained traction: that CDF already did a comparable study to DZero’s that negates the DZero claim of a 1 percent predisposition of muons over antimuons, and that CDF for technical reasons cannot conduct an analysis that could confirm or deny the result.
First, did CDF already rule out the DZero result? No ...
... This brings up the second rumor: Can CDF cross check the DZero result? Yes
So stay tuned...
