Here Are The Next Huge Mysteries That Physicists Must Solve
"We make progress slowly in trying to define things, we need to be very sure of what things are," Andre David, who works at CERN, said in a Google+ hangout today. "There might be other Higgs bosons but this one smells, quacks and walks exactly like a Higgs boson should."
Finding this particle confirms a theory that we've built particle physics around — the standard model developed decades ago. But even though its discovery has cemented a large part of our thinking on particle physics, we still have a long way to go to understand the universe as we don't know it.
"Clear evidence that the new particle is the Standard Model Higgs boson still would not complete our understanding of the universe," Patty McBride, head of the CMS Center at Fermilab, said in a statement. "We still wouldn't understand why gravity is so weak and we would have the mysteries of dark matter to confront."
First, this is just one of multiple theorized Higgs particles. There are still others that could pop out of the data. The researchers also need to nail down the features of this Higgs. So far, everything they've seen about it matches up with the theorized properties from the standard model, but something surprising may come out of the data.
There are also other Higgs particles that have been theorized with other properties. Analysis of more data and smushing together more particles may yield data detailing these other, still missing Higgses.
"In coming years, it [the LHC] will study many more of them, and that's what people will be focused on, hoping to see something unexpected," Peter Woit, a physicist at Columbia University told LiveScience. "No matter how hard one works at this though, one will only ever have partial information, never get to 100-percent sure that this particle is behaving exactly according to the theory."
Second, particle physicists still don't understand anti-matter. Tara Shears, who works at CERN, explained in a Google+ hangout today that when the universe was created, there were equal amounts of matter (which makes up the world around us) and anti-matter, which doesn't interact with our world. We think some of this antimatter still exists in our world, but much less than there use to be. This gradual decrease in the amount of antimatter can be explained by small inconsistencies in how matter and anti-matter act.
Figuring out what this tiny difference is between the two particles could shed light on huge swaths of particle physics. Currently the Large Hadron Collider experiment is working to sort through their huge amount to data to figure it out.
Researchers are still really confused about dark matter and dark energy — what it is, where it comes from, and what it means for the future of our universe. "There's a lot we don’t understand. We don’t know what dark matter is made of. It might be a type of particle from a theory we haven't proven yet," Shears said.
The LHC shut down last much in preparation for two years of upgrades. When it opens again in 2016, we will see it running at double its power, ready to rip into these theories.