Sunday 24 April 2011

Higgs?

Rumours of the Higgs boson being found at LHC...

Not Even Wrong has this:

This Week’s Rumor

A commenter on the previous posting has helpfully given us the abstract of an internal ATLAS note claiming observation of a resonance at 115 GeV. It’s the sort of thing you would expect to see if there were a Higgs at that mass, but the number of events seen is about 30 times more than the standard model would predict. Best guess seems to be that this is either a hoax, or something that will disappear on further analysis. But, since spreading well-sourced rumors is more or less in the mission statement of this blog, I think I’ll promote this to its own posting.

and Live Science has this:

Scientists Abuzz Over Controversial Rumor that God Particle Has Been Detected

Date: 22 April 2011 Time: 05:37 PM ET



A rumor is floating around the physics community that the world's largest atom smasher may have detected a long-sought subatomic particle called the Higgs boson, also known as the "God particle."
The controversial rumor is based on what appears to be a leaked internal note from physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 17-mile-long particle accelerator near Geneva, Switzerland. It's not entirely clear at this point if the memo is authentic, or what the data it refers to might mean — but the note already has researchers talking.

So, it is quite possible that ATLAS has detected Higgs at around 115GeV ... somewhere in line with the various theories of Higgs, now a long wait and much experimentation and sifting back through massive amounts of stored results. Would be quite something if it has been found, especially this far into the LHC's operation and long before 14TeV collisions - some exciting physics coming up and possible confirmation of the Standard Model (to some degree)!