UPDATE 5:57 AM The live webcast from CERN is overloaded but it appears that uncertainty still exists about the HB, they may have glimpsed its signal around 126 GeV – see below – Anthony
“The God Particle” may have been found.
Scientists in Geneva are expected to announce they have caught a glimpse of the elusive Higgs Boson on Tuesday in a press conference planned for 8 AM EST.
The particle is a vital factor in science’s understanding of the universe, but it has never been seen by scientists in any particle accelerator, perhaps until now. The theory of its existence goes all the way back to 1964.
Finding the Higgs Boson is one of the main goals of the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which recently started operation amidst worry that the search for the HB might open a rift or create a small black hole.
If scientists have gotten a glimpse of the Higgs, it could have far-reaching consequences in particle physics. It is the only particle predicted by the current favored theory of particle physics that has not yet been observed experimentally. Its discovery would likely validate the Standard Model theory.
Some trivia from the Wikipedia entry on it:
The Higgs boson is often referred to as “the God particle” by the media,[50] after the title of Leon Lederman‘s book, The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?[51] Lederman initially wanted to call it the “goddamn particle,” but his editor would not let him.[52]
I’m sure our physicist friend Luboš Motl will have some coverage at The Reference Frame once the announcement is made for us folks that are three quarks shy of full set of fermions.
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The Guardian reports on live tweets and what portions of the webcast they could view
While Fabiola Gianotti goes through the slides from the Atlas experiment, excluding various energies for the Higgs signal, here’s some thoughts from Prof Stephan Söldner-Rembold, Head of the Particle Physics Group at the University of Manchester:
ATLAS and CMS have presented an important milestone in their search for the Higgs particle, but it is not yet sufficient for a proper discovery given the amount of data recorded so far. Still, I am very excited about it, since the quality of the LHC results is exceptional.
The Higgs particle seems to have picked itself a mass which makes things very difficult for us physicists. Everything points at a mass in the range 115-140 GeV and we concentrate on this region with our searches at the LHC and at the Tevatron.
The results indicate we are about half-way there and within one year we will probably know whether the Higgs particle exists with absolute certainty, but it is unfortunately not a Christmas present this year.
The Higgs particle will, of course, be a great discovery, but it would be an even greater discovery if it didn’t exist where theory predicts it to be. This would be a huge surprise and secretly we hope this might happen. If this is case, there must be something else that takes the role of the “standard” Higgs particle, perhaps a family of several Higgs particles or something even more exotic. The unexpected is always the most exciting.
…
From Cern: “#ATLAS sees a small excess at a Higgs mass of 126 GeV coming from 3 channels. Local significance: 3.6 sigma but only 2.4 sigma globally”
That’s not enough for a “discovery” (which techically needs 5 sigma) but it is very interesting evidence for the Higgs.
Also: “#ATLAS excludes a #Higgs mass between 131 and 453 GeV at 95% confidence level at #CERN Higgs seminar”
…
Fabiola Gianotti has finished her presentation. So far,we know that Atlas seems to have found evidence for a bump around 126GeV for something that looks like the Higgs.
Next up is Guido Tonelli, spokesperson for Cern’s other main detector, the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS). As @iansample says, “So. What we’re looking for now is whether CMS detector has seen Higgs-like signals around the same mass (126GeV).”
…
How science has changed…doing some searching on the Atlas experiment, I came across this commercialization of the science at the Atlas store. At least they aren’t offering Pecan logs.
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The webcast will be shown here;
http://webcast.web.cern.ch/webcast/
Oh wow! Proper science with proper probabilities. Congratulations to all at CERN. It’s been a long wait but well worth it!
So, the Higgs field is The Aether then eh? 🙂
It will be interesting to see how the berks in the MSM mangle this ……
Exciting stuff!
Also recently discovered: enough electrons to power a star
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2011/12/13/donald-scott-voyager-1-updates-solar-electron-flux/
It’s Motl without the final s and I predict they’ll report hints rather than evidence
Thanks for thinking about this discipline, Anthony!
If there are real fans of particle physics among WUWT folks, the webcast at
http://webcast.web.cern.ch/webcast/
will begin at 8 a.m. Boston Winter Time. If you will watch it, you may also open a chat box
http://xat.com/chat/room/12544185/
where you may share your feelings or ask questions. I hope it will remain manageable. 😉
“Well let you know when it whizzes by….”
Bet: If they have found this one they’ll have to find the next.
Higgs +
OT but… [snip – simply saying so doesn’t make it OK here]
Don’t know why I always thought they would not find it, but, this will be interesting. During the 70s through early 90s I was always stuck to this “particle physics” tube waiting for the next shattering breakthrough.
I didn’t quite get the gist of that CERN animation. Is there some particle exchange mechanism involving the Higgs that does the curving of spacetime?
I mentioned on a couple Facebook posts that this could be a “massive” announcement.
@Luboš Motl
Particle Physics (well actually the technology of it) was my first love. I built a Cyclotron in the EO Lawrence style for my high school science project that went to the National Science Fair. Powered by my dad’s DC arc welder, it was a noisy and somewhat fearsome bugger to operate.
I am stunned.
I was confident that no such particle existed. Here’s why.
It was an idea that came out of left field by Peter Higgs in the sixties to answer the question why particles have mass – ie inertia. Since there was nothing in the standard model that provides an eplanation, Peter put forward the idea that inertia is the observed effect of an undiscovered field, named the Higgs field. He believed that it is particles moving through the Higgs field that gives the appearance of inertia. This gave rise to the realisation that if there is a Higgs field, there ought to be a corresponding particle. This is because in the standard model all fields are associated with particles that carry those fields. The particle that carries the electo magnetic field is of course the photon.
The problem I have is that such a field is a return to the theory of the aether. This was discredited by Einstein – if you have an aether, then that implies an absolute space, an absolute frame of reference against which all other frames can be measured. It also appears to violate Newton’s first law of motion, since it would imply that if particles are interacting with a field that is responsible for their inertia, then those particles should not continue to move in a straight line at constant velocity unless acted upon by an external force.
They may well have discovered a new particle, but does it mean that the Higgs field exists? That is the question.
If they have found it, I will give the EU 6 months before they tax it.
Luminiferous aether was unfashionable when it was just an understandable energy field. By defining it as a “particle” which can only be observed by elite physicists commanding billion-dollar research budgets, it becomes fashionable again.
Sort of like outhouses. When they were wooden shacks that any old peasant could build, they were unfashionable. Now that they’re highly expensive Carbon-Neutral Composting Toilets, requiring special EPA permits, they’re haute enough for San Francisco.
The Godot particle seems a better name!
Have they sorted out the “time-travelling” particles yet? Is it real or is just satellite drift causing a misreading?
Now that is science. We also recently had from CERN the results of the CLOUD experiments, led by Jasper Kirkby. Can CERN give these results as much exposure as the Higgs Boson will get once it is dedected? These are both very important to humaniy, the former is becasue it boosts standard model theory, while the second will pull the carpet from beneat the greatest scientific scam ever concocted and save the tax payers trillions of dollars/euros/yen, money that can be utilised to further enhance the quality of our lives.
I miss the bubble chambers!
[snip – off topic political junk and over the top]
The stream on the site isn’t working well. I hear the perimeter institute for theoretical physics is doing a live interactive chat with some of the physicists involved with the experiments later today at 12:30 est its on their site at http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca.
Oh, my,… Here we go, soon there’ll be pure H2O alternative medication for:
people who don’t eat enough…Higgs-challenged persons?
people who eat well enough…Higgs-aholics?
people who suffer food allergies…Higgs-intolerant people?
people who exercise too much…Higgs-deficient folks?
Watching the streaming video, now, and I get the distinct impression that the CERN folks are trying to justify their continued budgetary existence. No Higgs, yet, but things are looking good for something in the future. This seminar is primarily to note progress on the project.
Very interesting. And I’m happy to see they are open to the possibility the Higgs boson doesn’t exist rather than insisting it does exist and they just haven’t been looking in the right place.