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Higgs Signal Gains Strength
ananyo writes "Today the two main experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle accelerator, submitted the results of their latest analyses. The new papers (here here and here) boost the case for December's announcement of a possible Higgs signal. Physicists working on the In the case of the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, have been able to look at another possible kind of Higgs decay, and that allows them to boost their Higgs signal from 2.5 sigma to 3.1 sigma. Taken together with data from the other detector, ATLAS, Higgs' overall signal now unofficially stands at about 4.3 sigma."
I think they usually require 5 sigma (99.9999426697%) for it to be official.
So, we can detect Higgs but we can't detect multiple typos in the damn summary? Really?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
positron emissions have medical application http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positron_emission_tomography
strangely enough, application using one particle, the anti-neutrino, is in the works for reactor monitoring.
muons might be used to catalyze fusion or reduce lifespan of nuclear waste (with fusion products of catalyzed reaction
you are foolish, how can we engineer with the universe's components if we don't learn all we can about them?
How many millions of euro of taxpayer money have gone into this project, which will interest only a handful of scientists?
Approximately $9B, over 15 years, split between 20 nations. So on average, about $30M/year per country. Compared to Iraq or Afghanistan, that's a rounding error. Whatever may or may not come out of the Large Hadron Collider, I rather doubt either of those wars is going to show any ROI.
Stupidly assuming you're talking American "football", 119.99993120364 yards, or 0.00247666896 inches from the line.
That was almost a haiku if you drag "wire" out into two syllables, but the last line completely strays. What about this?
Synchrotron light source
Positron tomography
Superconductors
I left my statistics degree in my other pants... is 4.3 sigma a good thing? How many sigmas is "certainty"?
It's not good enough. They've got a good way to go before they achieve Six Sigma.
To make that goal, these scientists should probably go on a retreat, spend some time on team building exercises, and practice dynamic solution strategies, so that they can build up the synergies they need to deliver agile, customer-facing world class results that deliver a genuine Six Sigma experience.
So what you are saying is his transcription is accurate, to +/- 1 sigma?
All this is under pure mathematician's "null-hypothesis" assumptions. That is, we have a 99.999999999% confidence level of being right, unless we are making any mistake in our set of thousands of assumptions, there is any miscalibration, any fundamental error, systematic errors, ...
But this is not a mathematical exercise. It is a physics experiment. Knowing how the CMS/ATLAS collaboration works and how politized it is, If there is a (subtle but likely) mistake, then this number means nothing.
The correct reading would be: "we are 99.99999999% (or whatever) sure that if we are wrong it is not due to a purely random statistic fluctuation"
Other than that 5-sigma is a mere convention on when to trigger a press conference to declare "discovery"
This is about as certain as ... taxes ...
Doesn't that make it 99%?