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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."
It's my favorite ride at the fair!
...for not calling it the "God particle".
Proverbs 21:19
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
A Higgs Bosom ? ... now thats gotta be a worth a look!
Bosom
N ...
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
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.
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....
Well, this was found long after the funding was gone and the Tevatron was being taken apart for other experiments, but you go on insinuating that they're simply lying.
(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).
Are you asking the Europeans or the Americans?
Oh yeah. It's amazing how much stuff they find when their funding is up for review. Surely that is just a coincidence....
"So, wtf do we do now that funding's been cut and the thing's being mothballed or cannibalized?"
"Uh, how's about we analyze the data it collected?"
"Brillant [sic]! Smoley hokes, would you look at that? A freakin' Higgs boson!?!"
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
Er, not finding the Higgs Boson -- when we would be able to find it if with the LHC if it existed anywhere in the range allowed by the Standard Model -- would not leave us in the same place we started. We started not knowing if this final prediction of the Standard Model would be borne out or not. We'd end up knowing that the Standard Model was incorrect beyond those predictions that had already been verified, and that there was new physics that would have to be explored in order to find out how massive particles get their mass.
This would be very exciting for many people. Ruling out the Higgs would open the door for a lot of new avenues of research.
Probably the least exciting thing that could happen is that we verify the existence of the Higgs at ~125 GeV, and then find nothing else.
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Is finding proof of the Higgs Boson really the "most difference" that the Tevatron will have made during its long life?
No, it found the Top quark too, and that was really straining its capabilities, which is why the LHC was built (after the abandonment of the SSC).
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit