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LHC Homes In On Possible Higgs Boson Around 126GeV
New submitter Ginger Unicorn writes "In a seminar held at CERN today, the ATLAS and CMS experiments presented the status of their searches for the Standard Model Higgs boson. Their results are based on the analysis of considerably more data than those presented at the summer conferences, sufficient to make significant progress in the search for the Higgs boson, but not enough to make any conclusive statement on the existence or non-existence of the elusive Higgs. The main conclusion is that the Standard Model Higgs boson, if it exists, is most likely to have a mass constrained to the range 116-130 GeV by the ATLAS experiment, and 115-127 GeV by CMS. Tantalising hints have been seen by both experiments in this mass region, but these are not yet strong enough to claim a discovery."
the Standard Model become inconsistent with Higgs boson masses above 1.4 TeV, for example nonsensical total probabilities for certain scattering events greater than 100% appear (unitarity is violated)
One way to constrain the upper bound is with theory. The current Standard Model (without the Higgs) predicts that certain processes will start occurring more than 100% of the time at an energy of approximately 1TeV. The Higgs (or some other similar particle) fixes this problem but only if its mass is below a certain value.
Metastability might explain inflation. But it also invites the possibility that inflation could kick off again, and the universe could revert to a previous state where things like stars, planets, and life can not exist. That's what people have a problem with, I think.
Of course, the fact that this hasn't happened is proof that it probably cannot. The question we then need to answer is why not. It's as if God has us all in a gigantic microwave oven, and we're trying to figure out what's keeping him from hitting the 'Start' button...
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
The actual bump on the ATLAS graph was about 126 GeV, and the local sigma was 3.6 which is pretty good
This model of everything predicted a Higgs at 125.992, which is pretty close (with the current error bars). Could be coincidence, of course, but their idea of a well-defined set of rules that predicts each particle's mass correctly is tantalizing.
My God, it's Full of Source!
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