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LHC Researchers Expect First Glimpse of the Higgs Boson Next Week

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Josh:
LHC Researchers Expect First Glimpse of the Higgs Boson Next Week

There’s no official announcement yet--that comes next week--but word on the street and around the cafeteria at CERN says that scientists may announce that they’ve glimpsed the elusive Higgs boson at a meeting scheduled for Tuesday. Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider have been saying that they are closing on the so-called God Particle for a while now, and while a rock-solid 5-sigma event isn’t in the offing we might finally see our first experimental data that points toward a real Higgs sighting.

Why all the buzz all of a sudden? Firstly, next week’s meeting will see presentations by researchers from both the ATLAS and CMS experiments, the two main experiments at the LHC charged with finding the Higgs. That’s not particularly out of the ordinary, but rumor has it senior scientists from each experiment will be presenting, something that is usually delegated further down the chain of command.

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PopSci.com Source

40hz:
Awesome! Finally something really interesting and newsworthy to look forward to. Thx Josh! :Thmbsup:

IainB:
Yes, I found this about the theoretical Higgs boson in Wikipedia:
SpoilerThe Higgs boson is a hypothetical massive elementary particle that is predicted to exist by the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics. Its existence is postulated as a means of resolving inconsistencies in the Standard Model. Experiments attempting to find the particle are currently being performed using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, and were performed at Fermilab's Tevatron until Tevatron's closure in late 2011. Recently the BBC reported that the boson will possibly be considered as "discoverable" in December 2011, although more experimental data is still needed to make that final claim.

The Higgs boson is the only elementary particle predicted by the Standard Model that has not been observed in particle physics experiments. It is an integral part of the Higgs mechanism, the part of the SM which explains how most of the known elementary particles obtain their mass. For example, the Higgs mechanism would explain why the W and Z bosons, which mediate weak interactions, are massive whereas the related photon, which mediates electromagnetism, is massless. The Higgs boson is expected to be in a class of particles known as scalar bosons. (Bosons are particles with integer spin, and scalar bosons have spin 0.)

Theories that do not need the Higgs boson are described as Higgsless models. Some theories suggest that any mechanism capable of generating the masses of the elementary particles must be visible at energies below 1.4 TeV;[4] therefore, the LHC is expected to be able to provide experimental evidence of the existence or non-existence of the Higgs boson.
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Interestingly, there are apparently two groups of scientists:
(a) Higgs: those scientists who are believers in the SM (Standard Model) predictions and who apparently:
... expect the LHC experiment to be able to provide definitive experimental evidence of the existence of the Higgs boson.
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and

(b) Higgsless: those scientists who are non-believers in the SM - and who thus hold instead that the HM (Hiiggsless Model) is the Truth and who apparently:
expect the LHC experiment to be able to provide experimental evidence of the non-existence of the Higgs boson.
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Scientists! They're a funny lot aren't they?     :huh:

I don't know how many of either group might be climate scientists.

IainB:
Hiding in the Higgs data: hints of physics beyond the standard model
Looks like some seriously good science is going on here, demonstrated by the openness to revealing positive results as well as negative results.
It will be interesting to see whether a theoretical model - Standard ("Higgs") or Higgsless - might eventually be supported by the results of this research.

Josh:
Hiding in the Higgs data: hints of physics beyond the standard model
Looks like some seriously good science is going on here, demonstrated by the openness to revealing positive results as well as negative results.
It will be interesting to see whether a theoretical model - Standard ("Higgs") or Higgsless - might eventually be supported by the results of this research.

-IainB (April 20, 2012, 04:25 PM)
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And people called Cave Johnson crazy....Now let's go do some science!

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