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Final Analysis Suggests Tevatron Saw Hint of the Higgs Boson
ananyo writes with exciting news from the world of particle physics: "A hint of the Higgs boson, the missing piece in the standard model of particle physics, has been found in data collected by the Tevatron, the now-shuttered U.S. particle collider at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois. While not statistically significant enough in themselves to count as a 'discovery', the indications announced on 7 March at the Moriond conference in La Thuile, Italy, are consistent with 2011 reports of a possible standard model Higgs particle with a mass of around 125 GeV from experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. The data is more direct evidence of the Higgs than the constraints on its mass offered by the precise W boson mass measurement reported on Monday. On a sad note, the find vindicates Tevatron scientists who campaigned unsuccessfully to extend the collider's run. The request was turned down by the Department of Energy but this last hurrah suggests that Tevatron might indeed have found the Higgs ahead of CERN's Large Hadron Collider if they'd secured the funding required. The Tevatron is currently being raided for parts."
/me runs and hides.
LfG Tevatron
:)
Yeah, and I saw a hint of Jesus on my toast this morning. Now can I get a 2 Billion dollar advance on my breakfast funding to continue the research?
It's my favorite ride at the fair!
shutting things down right when they can make the most difference.
it sucks, but when you don't have the money to maintain them,,,,.
at least the shuttles are going to museums.
Oh, science humor.
But seriously, let's hope they're investing the money they saved from awesome future technology into reality television. Shark Tank just isn't cutting it for me.
...for not calling it the "God particle".
Proverbs 21:19
Tevatron is on the loose, let's call in Optimus Prime!
http://www.physicscentral.com/buzz/blog/index.cfm?postid=2156439899482364662
And the better answer is:
The sum total of what it cost to find one.
With your Government you don't need external enemies
MFG, omb, Zuerich
Wasn't the reason the Tevatron closed down because it couldn't explore the energy range where the Higgs was supposed to exist?
Is 125GeV at the bottom of that range?
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
50 years ago the U.S. could put a man into space. Today it can't.
50 years ago the U.S. was at the forefront of particle physics. Today it isn't.
50 years ago the U.S. started development of 3 different spacecraft on 5 different man rated rockets over a 7 year span. Today it's 10 years just to develop one.
50 years ago the U.S. had a plane capable of traveling at Mach 3.35. Today it doesn't.
I seriously feel bad for the future country my kids will inherit. It doesn't seem like we're moving in the right direction on the science and technology front.
If the US had extended funding for the Tevatron, the accomplishment of finding the Higgs as the Tevatron neared retirement would have been nice for American high energy physics, but it would likely have been bad for the field more broadly. Having the Higgs discovery near the beginning of data acquisition at the LHC will provide publicity and a morale boost that will enhance the productivity of the field over many years.
The Tevatron is currently being raided for parts
Now I have an image of it being pulled apart by a gang of Sandpeople
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
I was expecting that the Tevatron Saw would reveal what's inside the Higgs Boson.
I've heard that the new season of Jersey Shore contains 8.6% more indecent exposure incidents and 5% more Guido fights.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
First you have propose a decay scenario, several which exist for the Higgs. This scenario suggests what particle tracks will hit one of several hundred sub-detectors (several thousand in the LHC) for various angles and distances (lifetimes). And may have to be search for a wide set of rotations. Maybe only one per trillion collision events out of trillions recorded in petabytes of data. This is a multi-week supercomputer run for each scenario. An ambiguous result, the back to the drawing board, propose a new decay candidate and another calculation. Or as they plan do for half of every year, run the collider again to collect trillions more interesting collisions. Last years LHC proposed energy "bump" was only five contending events out of several trillion studied.
Finding exactly what you expect is boring.
The interesting science arises when you observe something you did not expect.
What happened to the word "closed"?
It was shuttered.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Parts for what? All the other active GeV range particle accelerators that the US is maggoty with?
No one is saying the Tevatron discovered the Higgs, or that it 'beat' the LHC. They're saying that now that they know what they're looking for, they found HINTS of it in their data.
Fun Fact: People from all over the world worked at the Tevatron in Illinois. We should all be sad it's gone. Also, many Americans are now working at, and helping to fund the LHC.
It's sad that these projects that bring us together in peace, get treated as if they were sporting events or yet another political pissing match.
Shutting down the Tevatron with the turn-on of the LHC was the right move, from my perspective in the field. The Tevatron would NEVER have reached the magic 5sigma threshold for discovery confirmation, something the LHC will do easily if the Higgs is really near 125GeV. And running the Tevatron isn't free: it's tens of millions of dollars a year, and many hundreds of man-years of effort. This funding would have been essentially "lost", but more importantly, the lost man-years would have decimated many other projects that Fermilab and the high energy physics community considered much more valuable than an additional year or two of Tevatron running. It would also have delayed for years the development of new accelerator projects at Fermilab that are considered extremely high priority within the field. These issues are why the shutdown decision was taken in the first place. Tevatron was a great machine for thirty plus years. But time marches on, and we don't keep high cost infrastructure running based just on nostalgia....
In other words, the people behind that claim are desperately trying to put some pressure on politicians to get their hands on more money for their pet project, and shift the blame to politicians for not succeeding at their objective.
And, yeah, it also sounds like they want to take the credit for LHC's future discoveries. Not nice.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
(and on LHC too) let me call the conclusions of the article bullshit.
This last hurrah suggests that Tevatron might indeed have found the Higgs ahead of CERN's Large Hadron Collider if they'd secured the funding required.
It took Tevatron 10 years to accumulate as enough data to reach a 4 sigma result (let us not discuss the statistical details). It would have taken years to reach the 5 sigma level. On the other hand LHC has obtained in one year almost as much data as Tevatron in 10. By summer 2012 the amount of data recorded by LHC will be an impossible goal for Tevatron to accomplish. It just made no sense at all to keep the old machine on.
The sad thing is not that Tevatron has been shut down but that the USA government is not investing any money in using the Fermilab infrastructure for some awesome future project (I'd love to see them try a muon collider).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKxDJpqK468
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
You could go around 100 years back and comment on the decline of the British Empire. On the whole, the UK weathered this dramatic change fairly well (no viking hordes or precursor Red Dawn equivalent). We can only hope (and prepare for) the same in the US - though we might have too many selfish greedy bastards to survive our transistion without landing in the third world.
Actually the proper term is Jawa, racist.
You have to pay for social programs somehow. But really, the DOE put all our (USA) eggs in the CERN basket, so it made no sense to duplicate efforts. Sure it would be cool, but the LHC is the future.
Conservative, mod down for violating
The next big thing will no doubt be the Petatron Plasma Wakefield Accelerator. Where will it be built? Who knows, but it probably be small enough to fit inside a large industrial building. Or likely an adjunct to an existing collider.
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Electron%E2%80%93Positron_Collider#An_unfinished_discovery_of_the_Higgs_boson
LEP was able to do 200GeV near the end of his operation. Probably that it could have been hacked to discover the Higg.
Thanks for the excellent explain. "It just made no sense at all to keep the old machine on." It's thirty years old. Damned straight it's obsolete, even if very cool tech for its time.
I'd love to see them try a muon collider.
Like this? Why? You just proved Fermilab's not capable of keeping up with the LHC, so I'm left wondering what it would cost to retrofit Fermilab to that level. I think concentrating on CERN is a better basket for our eggs.
Then again, I'm a dilettante (not an expert).
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
I'd love to see them try a muon collider.
Like this? Why? You just proved Fermilab's not capable of keeping up with the LHC, so I'm left wondering what it would cost to retrofit Fermilab to that level. I think concentrating on CERN is a better basket for our eggs.
Then again, I'm a dilettante (not an expert).
Fermilab is the organization (like CERN); Tevatron is the accelerator (like LHC).
If not: Tevatron couldn't keep up with LHC, but then, neither could CERN's ISR keep up with Tevatron. That's silly. There's no reason to think that other, solid science can't happen at Fermilab despite their hadron collider being superseded by CERN's.
For those interested, Tomasso gives a good run down on the report here
Like this? Why? You just proved Fermilab's not capable of keeping up with the LHC, so I'm left wondering what it would cost to retrofit Fermilab to that level. I think concentrating on CERN is a better basket for our eggs.
Then again, I'm a dilettante (not an expert).
CMS is the Compact Muon Solenoid: a particle detector, a muon collider would be something very different. You can think of it as the successor to LEP (the old CERN electron collider, that was dismantled to make room for LHC), the same way LHC is the successor to Tevatron.
A muon collider would be a machine complementary to the LHC, being able to look for things LHC can't see and to look with grater precision at anything the LHC may find.