LHC Discovers New Particle That Looks Like the Higgs Boson

The wait is over: new submitter Roger W Moore (among many, many other submitters) writes "The ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN have just announced the discovery of a new particle which is consistent with a Standard Model Higgs boson. There is still a lot of work to do to confirm whether this really is the Higgs, and if so whether it is a Standard Model Higgs, but this is a major result."

Comments

Re:Dr. Higgs himself said it best...

[toruonu]

Well it's not that much good luck really. CMS showed the expected significance of a SM Higgs boson for the full 5 channel combination to be ~6 sigma for 125 GeV. So seeing 4.9 sigma is actually a downward fluctuation (or in other words unlucky) or it's not Higgs.

Also, it's odd to see how much worse ATLAS was. They got 10% more statistics, yet see about the same significance as CMS. They also presented only 2 channels (true, the most sensitive ones) and didn't even attempt to fit the mass of the new particle (while CMS gave 125.3 +- 0.6 GeV, a precision of 0.5%!!!) nor did they look at the other supporting channels that could indicate if this is SM Higgs or some other particle. CMS as an example sees some tension in the 2tau final state where there is actually a downward fluctuation and almost exclusion of SM Higgs. CMS also showed first fits of couplings to fermions and bosons and that was very interesting result. ATLAS just claimed the 5 sigma and approximate mass. Really expected more of them...

Worth the waking hours

[Pro-feet]

I made it in the auditorium after queueing through half the night, but it was totally worth it. The atmosphere was collegeial and almost rapturous, one of sharing a feeling that we have as a whole community worked for so long to prove some mathematical construction of almost 50 years ago to be really realized in nature.

And let it now please NOT be a standard-model Higgs boson, but something a little more intriguing!

Re:Found at 125 GeV

[dkf]

Photon propagation is affected by gravity, though.

But the Higgs mechanism isn't there to explain gravity. It's there to explain why some particles have rest masses at all. AIUI, a large part of the mass of a proton or neutron is explained by the energy stored in the Strong Nuclear binding field that couples the component quarks, but the Higgs mechanism is there to explain the rest.