I'm not sure exactly what this means, but ...
A respected scientist from the Cern particle physics laboratory has told the BBC he expects to see "the first glimpse" of the Higgs boson next week.
...Next Tuesday, two separate teams will each reveal the outcome of trawling through their latest data from LHC collisions. A spokesman for one of these teams told us that this year alone they've searched the remains of some 350 trillion collisions, with only ten or so producing candidates for a reliable sign of the Higgs.
Anybody got any inside info?
- Log in to post comments
More like this
The Weizmann Institute's Prof. Eilam Gross is currently the ATLAS Higgs physics group convener. He originally wrote this piece in Hebrew for the Yediot Aharonot daily.
The Best There Is - For Now
"The God Particle," as the Higgs boson is often called, comes from the title of the book by Nobel…
"There are no physicists in the hottest parts of hell, because the existence of a 'hottest part' implies a temperature difference, and any marginally competent physicist would immediately use this to run a heat engine and make some other part of hell comfortably cool." -Richard Davisson
The Large…
"Science for me is very close to art. Scientific discovery is an irrational act. It's an intuition which turns out to be reality at the end of it -- and I see no difference between a scientist developing a marvelous discovery and an artist making a painting." -Carlo Rubbia, famous and infamous…
"Give me a coin. <Takes Coin.> All right. Uh... heads, I win, tails, you lose. Right? <Flips coin.> Tails, you lose." -Ralph Kramden
All things being equal, you're well aware that if you flipped a completely fair coin, you'd have a 50% chance of it landing on heads, and a 50% chance of…
Not inside info, but the buzz in the blogosphere is that both detector coalitions have seen a bump in the two photon channel around 125 GeV. It's not significant enough to say they've found the Higgs, but they might be zeroing in on it. (That is, they may have found it, but they can't be confident for many more months.)
I've got the inside info. Well, the media have really received it from my blog that received it from members of CERN. See details:
http://motls.blogspot.com/2011/12/higgs-at-125-gev-and-susy-with-heavy…
http://motls.blogspot.com/2011/12/atlas-cms-bosses-will-give-higgs-talk…
That's what I'm hearing through closed lips as well. Something like a 2.5 - 3 sigma bump. Both experiments are seeing it, independently, at the same mass so might be more than statistical fluctuation (but might not be at 3 sigma). We really need to see it at the same mass in other channels as well, as well as at least a 5 sigma result. Still, fun times....
Actually, not so heavy as your title suggests. The mass may be "too light" for the vacuum to remain stable (think doomsday):
http://www.science20.com/alpha_meme/light_higgs_discovered_and_about_de…
i for one don't think they would have put the time,energy and money into the LHC if they did not think it would be found quickly.the gizmo has not even come to full power.whats going to be of great interest is what happens next when things that were not even thought of start showing up and that's what it was really built to do.