Race For the "God Particle" Heats Up

SpuriousLogic writes "CERN is losing ground rapidly in the race to discover the elusive Higgs boson, its American rival claims. Fermilab say the odds of their Tevatron accelerator finding it first are now 50-50 at worst, and up to 96% at best. CERN's Lyn Evans admitted the accident which will halt the $7B Large Hadron Collider until September may cost them one of the biggest prizes in physics."

Comments

Re:...its a 50-50 chance

[drinkypoo]

Wow thats a worse investment than that stimulus package

You mean it in jest, but the "stimulus package" (aka handout for the rich) is going to provide more ammunition for the robber barons to shoot at us with, whereas these colliders are going to lead to developments in science whether they find this particle or not.

they would say that, wouldn't they

[petes_PoV]

It's all about funding. If one establishment can make an unsubstantiated claim that attracts publicity and therefore money, then why not. It's not as if their scientific credibility (cough, cold-fusion) will be questioned. If so long as they don't say it's certain that they'll produce a given result, they can always claim "well, if we'd had more money ..."

Re:How do you give odds for that?

[The_Wilschon]

What they mean (yes, I'm on CDF, and beginning my own segment of a Higgs search analysis), is that there is a 50/50 chance that the Tevatron will have acquired sufficient data for us to be sensitive to a Standard Model Higgs at reasonable mass ranges (115 - maybe 300 GeV/c^2). Thus, if it exists (the SM Higgs specifically) we'll be able to tell it is there, and if it does not exist, we'll be able to say with a high level of confidence that it is not there.

To discover the Higgs, we must show that given a theory without the Higgs, our data would only occur 1 in 2 million times we did an experiment like this, (5 sigma significance, standard for particle discovery) and of course the the difference in the data is consistent with a Higgs.

To exclude the Higgs in a certain mass range, we must show the opposite: if there were a Higgs, our data would only occur some very small percentage of the time (I can't remember the exact significance, but it is less stringent than discovery, again standard).

LEP already excluded masses below 114 GeV/c^2, and the Tevatron has excluded a small mass range around 160 or 170 GeV/c^2.

However, all that said, I disagree with the apparently official Fermilab line (50/50). We have a small chance of excluding all the available mass ranges, but the amount of data needed to go from excluding it if its not there to discovering it if it is there is huge. We would need several times as much data as we will have unless we keep running for quite a bit longer. Maybe we can get a chunk of the gov't stimulus package? ;)

Without any data to base your odds on, you're just making some shit up. Not only is their level of precision low, but there is zero confidence.

Quite the contrary, sir, and I do somewhat resent remarks like these, although I understand they were made in haste in your frenzy to get first post. We have a tremendous amount of data, and we have theories that describe exactly what we're looking for. It's almost just a statistical game now. Our level of precision is in fact quite high (although not as high as is achievable at a lepton collider), and as I said above, we have excluded some potential Higgs masses to a high level of confidence.

Re:How do you give odds for that?

[mzs]

Here is a nice graphic of what you described about the exclusions for a light-mass Higgs:

http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/breaking/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/higgsexclusionplotfy08.jpg

Re:How do you give odds for that?

[NoobixCube]

To put it another way, reminding people of the way they were taught to divide in primary school, dividing by anything is splitting it up into that many groups. Exactly how can you divide something into zero groups? The answer isn't infinite, because that would imply creating more stuff to put in those groups. If you divide by zero, whatever it is your dividing has nowhere to go.