London: The elusive "God particle" or Higgs boson could have multiple versions, says a new study.
The Higgs boson is the sub-atomic particle which explains why all other particles have mass.
Finding the Higgs is the primary objective of the 6billion pound Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment near Geneva.
But recent results gathered by the DZero experiment at the Tevatron particle accelerator, operated by Fermilab in Illinois, US, indicate the existence of as many as five particles.
DZero is designed to provide insights into why the world around us is composed of normal matter and not anti-matter.
Researchers working on the experiment noted collisions of protons and anti-protons in the Tevatron.
The collisions produced pairs of matter particles slightly more often than they yielded anti-matter particles.
The results demonstrated a 1 per cent difference in the production of pairs of muon (matter) particles and pairs of anti-muons (anti-matter particles) in these high-energy collisions.
Physicists had already witnessed such differences - known as "CP violation", but these effects were small compared to those seen by the DZero experiment.
The DZero results demonstrated much more significant "asymmetry" of matter and anti-matter than what could be explained by the Standard Model.
According to Bogdan Dobrescu, Adam Martin and Patrick J Fox from Fermilab, this large asymmetry effect can be accounted for by the existence of multiple Higgs bosons, reports The BBC.
They added that the data pointed to five Higgs bosons with similar masses but different electric charges.
Three would have a neutral charge and one each would have a negative and positive electric charge.
This is known as the two-Higgs doublet model.
The researchers published the latest DZero study on the pre-print server arXiv.org; the results were reported by Symmetry magazine.
ANI
First Published: Tuesday, June 15, 2010, 13:38