Otto Eberhardt & 6 others: Impact of a Higgs Boson at a Mass of 126 GeV on the Standard Model with Three and Four Fermion Generations, Phys. Rev. Lett. 109,24 (2012) 241802 http://arxiv.org/abs/1209.1101 Press release: http://www.kit.edu/visit/pi_2012_12398.php QUOTE “But why does nature have second and third generations, if these are hardly needed? And are there maybe more generations of particles?”, ask the main authors of the article, Martin Wiebusch and Otto Eberhardt. At least, the latter question is answered: “There are exactly three fermion generations in the standard model of particle physics!” For their analysis, the researchers combined latest data collected by the particle accelerators LHC and Tevatron with many known measurements results relating to particles, such as the Z-boson or the top-quark. The result of the statistical analysis is that the existence of further fermions can be excluded with a probability of 99.99999 percent (5.3 sigma). The most important data used for this analysis come from the recently discovered Higgs particle. END QUOTE You may wonder how the hell they can rule out the existence of further particles. For example, if there were some 4th kind of lepton (the 3 known kinds are electron, muon, and tauon, the latter two being unstable) or quark, or neutrino, with huge mass-energy, then due to the postulated hugeness presumably it would have no effect on anything we are capable of observing, so it might well exist for all our experiments can tell... right? I think their reasoning is something like the following. They presume that a large fraction of the "mass" of the new particles is not mass per se, but rather is effective mass due to interaction-energy with the all-pervading Higgs scalar field. It is this "Higgs mechanism" that allows the W and Z vector bosons to have effective mass even though in Yang-Mills theory they necessarily have zero mass, thus rescuing and enabling Yang-Mills theory to be physically real. Their point: given this is the cause of the new particles having most of their mass, the Higgs is going to have something to say about that. If it were assumed to have enormous interactions, then the Higgs ought to have enough-altered physics we would have seen that, which we do not. So I think their idea is: if the new particles had small masses we would have seen them. If they had large masses due to Higgs effect, we would have seen Higgs bosons alterations that we do not. Therefore, there are no more kinds of new particles, QED. I do not know whether I believe this, and may be incompetent to decide. But it is an interesting line of reasoning. And the effects of this line of reasoning could be devastating to numerous theories of particle physics. But I see an obvious huge problem. We know that new particles must exist because of "dark matter" which has been detected gravitationally and outweighs the normal matter in the universe. If this mainstream view is correct, then this new paper yields an immediate proof that 1=0. -- Warren D. Smith http://RangeVoting.org <-- add your endorsement (by clicking "endorse" as 1st step)