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LHC To Narrow Search For Higgs Boson
New submitter mraudigy sends this quote from Physorg:
"CERN scientists say their data from two main experiments using CERN's $10-billion Large Hadron Collider under the Swiss-French border will be made public next Tuesday, but any firm discovery will have to wait until next year. They say the data helps narrow the region of the search because it excludes some of the higher energy ranges where the Higgs boson might be found, and shows some intriguing possibilities involving a small number of 'events' at the lower energy ranges."
It means there are now tight limits on where it could possibly be. No-one is claiming it's been found (well, other than the tabloid press you mention who've been doing the damndest to do exactly that), but that now there are only narrow ranges where it could lie. The nice thing is that they *are* ranges. I'm old enough to remember when all we could say about the mass of the Higg's boson was that it was above something like 100GeV, and now we know that if it does exist, it's in increasingly narrow sections of parameter space.
What I'd like is that it isn't there. Partly because I've never been entirely comfortable with the Higg's (or in some respects the direction of particle theory since about 1970 or so), but mainly because if it is there I'm liable to lose a bet I'd much rather have won.
I presume at the magic energy level you'll see an increase in particles detected. These would be decay particles of new particle created. Then these decay particles would have to be of the right kind that could decay from a Higgs, deduced by charge, energy, direction, lifetime ... They record trillions of candidate collisions which will have to be sifted for various hypotheses.
I read recently they are still studying an energy bump in the final runs of the Tevatrron. Whether it really exists and possibly a new particle.
Page where the Dec 13th talk material will appear:
http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=164890
That's the kinetic energy of a flying mosquito per proton. The whole beam is supposed to have the kinetic energy of an aircraft carrier.
But you're thinking heat. Temperature is different. According to the conversion on Wikipedia, 1 TeV is just over one thousand trillion degrees. That's pretty hot.