Physics blogs hint that long-sought Higgs boson is in sight
By Thomas H. Maugh II
LATimes.com
June 20, 2012
Physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider on the border of France and Switzerland may be on the verge of announcing the discovery of the long-sought Higgs boson, the so-called God particle that theorists believe gives all other particles mass. Physics bloggers are atwitter -- figuratively and literally -- with speculation that the discovery will be announced at the upcoming International Conference on High Energy Physics to be held in Melbourne, Australia, beginning July 4. If the speculation is true, the announcement would have to be considered one of the greatest physics feats of the last half century.
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Two large teams of researchers are now analyzing data from more than a year of such collisions. A report last fall suggested that one team had seen traces of what might be the Higgs with a mass of 126 gigaelectronvolts (GeV), which would be in the right range. In contrast, a proton has a mass of 1 Gev, while an electron has a mass of only 500,000 electronvolts. But their findings had a so-called three-sigma confidence: that is, there remained a 13% possibility that the results happened by chance. Physicists generally require a five-sigma reliability, meaning a 0.000028% possibility that the results are due to chance, before announcing a "discovery."
A second team obtained results suggesting the Higgs has a mass of 124 GeV, again with about a three-sigma reliability. The teams are now said to be working feverishly to refine and reconcile those results before the July 4 meeting and the outside world is waiting expectantly. But a spokesman for one of the teams, Fabiola Gianotti, said in an email to the New York Times, "Please do not believe the blogs."
In any case, it is only two more weeks until the meeting, at which time the veil of secrecy, one hopes, will be lifted.
Full article: http://www.latimes.com/news/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-higgs-boson-20120620,0,5333804.story?track=rss
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