Higgsteria!!

[weakmagneto]

June 27, 2012
Herald Sun

MELBOURNE will be the accidental centre of the universe next week, ground zero for what could be the greatest announcement in physics for half a century.

More than 700 leading physicists are gathering for their biannual conference amid feverish speculation that the almost mythical sub-atomic particle that gives the universe its mass - the Higgs boson, or the so-called "God particle" - has been found.

Science buffs are calling it Higgsteria. It took a meltdown by the world's biggest machine, CERN'S Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, to put Melbourne in the spotlight.

The discovery was expected to be announced at the last conference, in Paris, but the chance was missed when 50 giant magnets blew up, setting research back.

"That's how we got lucky, by accident," conference deputy chairman Prof Ray Volkas said.

The "God particle" has been a mystery for almost 50 years and the $9 billion collider was built to find it by smashing particles together at near light speed to create Big Bang conditions.

It has been the longest and most expensive search in the history of science.

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/boffin ... 6409451980

[Lincoln]

http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressRel ... 6.12E.html

I'm at CERN this week. It might be worth your while to view this seminar (at 0300 US eastern time on July 4^th!!!!). There will be two 45-minute long technical seminars (CMS first, followed by ATLAS) and then a press conference. Everything will be web streamed.

One thing to keep in mind is that discovery of a particle is one thing. Proving it is the Higgs boson is something entirely different. This is the opening paragraphs of this saga, not the final ones.

[Lincoln]

Fermilab is coming out with its own Higgs announcement at 0900 on July 2, Chicago time.

[weakmagneto]

Tevatron Scientists Announce Their Final Results On the Higgs Particle
ScienceDaily (July 2, 2012)

After more than 10 years of gathering and analyzing data produced by the U.S. Department of Energy's Tevatron collider, scientists from the CDF and DZero collaborations have found their strongest indication to date for the long-sought Higgs particle. Squeezing the last bit of information out of 500 trillion collisions produced by the Tevatron for each experiment since March 2001, the final analysis of the data does not settle the question of whether the Higgs particle exists, but gets closer to an answer.

The Tevatron scientists unveiled their latest results on July 2, two days before the highly anticipated announcement of the latest Higgs-search results from the Large Hadron Collider in Europe.

"The Tevatron experiments accomplished the goals that we had set with this data sample," said Fermilab's Rob Roser, cospokesperson for the CDF experiment at DOE's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. "Our data strongly point toward the existence of the Higgs boson, but it will take results from the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe to establish a discovery."

Scientists of the CDF and DZero collider experiments at the Tevatron received a round of rousing applause from hundreds of colleagues when they presented their results at a scientific seminar at Fermilab. The Large Hadron Collider results will be announced at a scientific seminar at 2 a.m. CDT on July 4 at the CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland.

"It is a real cliffhanger," said DZero co-spokesperson Gregorio Bernardi, physicist at the Laboratory of Nuclear and High Energy Physics, or LPNHE, at the University of Paris VI & VII. "We know exactly what signal we are looking for in our data, and we see strong indications of the production and decay of Higgs bosons in a crucial decay mode with a pair of bottom quarks, which is difficult to observe at the LHC. We are very excited about it."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 141716.htm