Defunct Tevatron collider contributes Higgs boson data

Science : Although Fermilab’s Tevatron collider in Batavia, Illinois, failed to find the famed Higgs boson, three years after it was shut down, it has revealed additional properties of the particle. The Higgs was first detected in 2012 at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), where physicists determined it had a mass of 125 GeV. However, other distinctive properties, such as spin and parity, remained to be confirmed. Spin refers to the particle’s angular momentum, and parity to the symmetry of its spatial configuration. The standard model predicts the Higgs to have zero spin and positive parity. Now, Tevatron researchers have confirmed that the Higgs fits the standard model predictions. Unlike the researchers at the LHC, who looked at the way the Higgs decays into other particles, the Tevatron researchers studied its production, in tandem with a Z or W boson, from a hypothetical parent particle. Although CERN researchers claim to have already set limits on the Higgs’s spin and parity, Tevatron researchers say the limits they were able to set are slightly stronger.