Psychedelia.dk

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 latest results narrow the field even more: Atlas has excluded all masses outside the range of 115–130 GeV, and the CMS team has revised the range to 117–127 GeV. Raising anticipation still further, each experiment separately reports that the LHC's high-energy collisions between protons generated an excess of particles that could be the products of Higgs particle production. The ATLAS result is consistent with a 125–126 GeV Higgs at a statistical level of at most 3.6 standard deviations, and the CMS team reports a 124GeV signal of at most 2.6 standard deviations. In particle physics, a statistical significance of five standard deviations is considered to be proof of a particle's existence, and three standard deviations to be evidence that a particle may exist. The Atlas and CMS results have not yet been combined, so a joint probability is not available.

The putative particle weighs in at about 125 billion electronvolts, about 125 times heavier than a proton and 500,000 times heavier than an electron, according to one team of 3,000 physicists, known as Atlas, for the name of their particle detector. The other equally large team, known as CMS – for their detector, the Compact Muon Solenoid – found bumps in their data corresponding to a mass of about 126 billion electronvolts.

If the particle does exist at all, it must lie within the range of 115 to 127 billion electronvolts, according to the combined measurements. "We cannot conclude anything at this stage," said Fabiola Gianotti, the Atlas spokeswoman, adding, "Given the outstanding performance of the LHC this year, we will not need to wait long for enough data and can look forward to resolving this puzzle in 2012."

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