Higgs boson puffed up the cosmos

摘要

The higgs boson has been moonlighting. Not content with its clay job of giving other particles their mass, it may also have driven the expansion of the early universe, given a little tinkering, according to two separate studies.rnSoon after the big bang the eariy universe is believed to have undergone a period of rapid expansion, known as inflation. The idea is that hypothetical particles, aptly named "inflatons", drove this expansion by pushing space apart.rnBut there's a problem. "If you ask cosmologists what the inflaton actually is, they will stumble," says Anupam Mazumdar at Lancaster University in the UK. "We need a connection between the inflaton and particles that we know about."