Exciting San Jose Mercury News Report
By Dennis Overbye
New York Times
Physicists will have to keep holding their breath a little while longer. Two teams of scientists sifting debris from highenergy proton collisions in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research outside Geneva, said Tuesday that they had recorded tantalizing hints —but only hints—of a longsought subatomic particle known as the Higgs boson, whose existence is a key to explaining why there is mass in the universe. By next summer, the way the collider is operating, they said, they will have enough data to say finally whether the elusive particle really exists.
If the particle does exist, it must lie within the range of 115 billion to 127 billion electron volts, according to the combined measurements. The putative particle would weigh in at about 125 billion
or 126 billion electron volts, about 125 times heavier than a proton and 250,000 times heavier than an electron, reported one team of 3,000 physicists, known as Atlas, for the name of their particle detector.
Meanwhile, the other team, known as CMS — for their detector, the Compact Muon Solenoid — found what their spokesman Guido Tonelli termed “a modest excess” in their data corresponding to masses around 124 billion electron volts. The physicists from the different teams are already discussing whether these differences are significant.
Showing off one striking bump in the data, Fabiola Gianotti, a spokeswoman for the Atlas team, said, “If we are just being lucky, it will take a lot of data to kill it.” For the last 20 years, suspicious bumps that might have been the Higgs have come and gone and scientists cautioned that the same thing could happen again. Physicists said the chance that these results were a fluke was about 1 percent, which is not enough to claim a discovery, but is enough to inspire excitement
