THE rumour mill is turning once again. As New Scientist went to press, the physics blogosphere was a-twitter with suggestions that the Higgs boson might have been spotted. Teams working at the Large Hadron Collider will set out their findings at a special seminar next week. Though their report won’t be decisive, it could prove to be the first sign of the world’s most wanted particle (see “Signals point to a light Higgs boson“).
What if it is? The Higgs boson only makes sense in the context of a theory that goes beyond the “standard model” of physics – and evidence for the favoured candidate, supersymmetry, has proved frustratingly elusive (see “The truth hurts: LHC breaks supersymmetry’s beauty“).
If the LHC’s signal does turn out to be the Higgs, 2011 will undoubtedly go down as a famous year for the experimenters. In 2012, it will be the theorists’ turn to show what they are made of.
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