Professor Peter Higgs opens the ‘Collider’ exhibition at the Science Museum (Picture: Rex)

The new particle discovered at the Large Hadron Collider may not be the Higgs Boson – the so-called ‘God particle’ which scientists have sought for decades – according to a team of Danish physicists.

Professor Mads Toudal Frandsen of the University of Southern Denmark says that the particle detected in the results from the LHC might not be the Higgs – but something entirely diferent.

More than 10,000 scientists worked for decades on the £6 billion search for the particle – and announced that it had been found in 2013.

The Danish team believes that, instead, it is a new sort of particle – a techni-higgs – which would force us to rewrite the laws of physics.




The discovery could also help to explain where the ‘dark matter’ detected in distant galaxies by our telescopes came from.

When the LHC team announced they had found a particle likely to to be the long-sought Higgs boson, it brought a tear to the face of the 84-year-old Scottish physicist, Peter Higgs, who’d first theorised the particle 40 years before.

‘The CERN data is generally taken as evidence that the particle is the Higgs particle. It is true that the Higgs particle can explain the data but there can be other explanations, we would also get this data from other particles,’ said Mads Toudal Frandsen.

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‘The researchers’ analysis does not debunk the possibility that CERN has discovered the Higgs particle. That is still possible – but it is equally possible that it is a different kind of particle.’

‘The current data is not precise enough to determine exactly what the particle is. It could be a number of other known particles,’ says Mads Toudal Frandsen.

‘We believe that it may be a so-called techni-higgs particle. This particle is in some ways similar to the Higgs particle – hence half of the name.’

The Danish team believe that the techni-higgs is made of techni-quarks – held together by an unknown force.

‘A techni-higgs particle is not an elementary particle. Instead, it consists of so-called techni-quarks, which we believe are elementary. Techni-quarks may bind together in various ways to form for instance techni-higgs particles, while other combinations may form dark matter. We therefore expect to find several different particles at the LHC, all built by techni-quarks,’ says Mads Toudal Frandsen.

Although the techni-higgs particle and Higgs particle can easily be confused in experiments, they are two very different particles belonging to two very different theories of how the universe was created.

If true, the techni-higgs would offer an explanation for dark matter – and could mean yet more discoveries await from the LHC when it switches its beams on once again in 2015.