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Well, it's ruled out some of my older papers - which is a good thing! The Higgs at 126 times the mass of the proton is heavier than was expected and it's surprisingly tricky to accomodate that mass in many theories of new physics such as those that try to explain dark matter. One very straightforward thing this does for new theories is that previously we had to come up with predictions that allowed for a range of Higgs masses. Now that free parameter has become a constraint that has to be satisfied, so it narrows the freedom we have when creating new theories. Those constraints mean that we can be much more specific with predictions for new theories of physics, which hopefully will lead to new discoveries.
This actually has relatively little influence on my current research as I'm working on cosmic rays these days rather that dark matter and particle physics, but it will certainly be a huge help (and a bit of a head scratcher) for theorists who are working on LHC predictions. Just to give you an idea, here are all the theory phenomenology papers released as pre-prints since last Wednesday's announcement: http://arxiv.org/list/hep-ph/pastweek?show=121 There are 34 with Higgs in the title. Getting a Higgs paper out within days of it being discovered is an impressive achievement, but that's just the start of this field of research. People will be studying this particle in enormous detail in the coming years, looking for any hint that it might not be a common or garden Higgs but something more exotic.
These particles interact with almost everything. We've just discovered a particle that is omnipresent in the universe. It's field literally exists everywhere. Nothing else we know of has that property. If we break it down and understand exactly how it works, we'll have understood one of the fundamental pillars that the universe is built on. That is likely to have wide-reaching consequences that we can't begin to imagine. It's true frontier science.
Originally Posted by Korash
