Already boasting fame and cachet, the Higgs boson has jumped another hurdle on the road to immortality: publication in a peer-reviewed journal.
Two landmark papers ? one from each of the twin experiments responsible for the particle's discovery at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland ? are published in Physics Letters B (doi.org/jbt and doi.org/jb7).
Both papers were dedicated to scientists who died before the search was complete. The same journal published the paper from Peter Higgs in the 1960s that sparked the hunt for a mass-giving boson.
Big backing
The Higgs boson was the last undiscovered particle in the tremendously successful standard model of particle physics, which lays out the fundamental particles and forces of nature and the way they interact.
So far it appears that the LHC's Higgs discovery completes the standard model, and the result was widely embraced by scientists even before its official publication.
"In practice I would say that, as far as the community of particle physicists were concerned, the official release of the Higgs preprints on July 31 was more significant than the official publication date," says Howard Haber at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Beyond the standard
Still, the hunt for new physics continues, as the standard model itself is known to be lacking.
Most recently, a paper posted to a non-peer-reviewed physics preprint website (arxiv.org/abs/1208.3829) reports signs of a new boson at the Nuclotron experiment at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia.
About 3000 times lighter than the Higgs, that boson would be the first non-standard particle discovered ? but it's very, very early days. "I would say that most of us are quite sceptical," says Haber.
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