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New Bounds On the Higgs Boson Mass

Posted by kdawson on from the pulling-in-the-walls dept.

As the LHC continues to run at half power for the next year+, the US-based Tevatron continues to crank out results. Reader hweimer writes "Three new papers in Physical Review Letters present the latest results for the Higgs boson mass coming from Fermilab's Tevatron. The new data mandates that the Higgs boson mass within the standard model lies between 115 and 150 GeV." A year back we discussed the Tevatron's previous shrinking of the search space for the Higgs "God particle."

1 of 173 comments (clear)

  1. To be clear what this means. by JoshuaZ · · Score: 5, Interesting

    These are bounds for the mass of the Higgs boson assuming it exists. If it doesn't exist, this data is meaningless. What will presumably eventually happen is that we'll narrow the mass down to a very tiny bound (if it exists) which would be strong evidence for its existence. Or we might detect the Higgs boson using some other methods and higher energies, such as those at the LHC. Alternatively, if the Higgs boson doesn't exist then we may end up narrowing the upper and lower bounds until they cross each other. In that case the Standard Model will be wrong and we'll have an interesting day.