Higgs evidence

[steuard]

I have a final to finish writing, but I wanted to share a quick summary of the Higgs news from this morning (for those of you who care but somehow haven't seen it yet). You can read Sean Carroll's summary for a few more details (and links to lots of posts with more detailed commentary), but my take on the talks boils down to this:

1. The current LHC data makes it look awfully likely that the Higgs boson exists and has a mass (energy) of about 125GeV. Similarly strong evidence has appeared and then proven to be statistical noise in the past, but the agreement between two experiments and the strong expectation that the Higgs ought to exist somewhere in the ever-shrinking viable mass range make this time seem more promising.


2. The data from the CMS experiment seems more thoroughly analyzed, and its result (considered alone) is real but weak enough that I would hardly have paid attention to it. The data from the ATLAS experiment is perhaps less complete, but it shows a clearer signal. The two signals don't quite line up at the same mass, which could be a bad sign, but they're awfully close to being consistent with each other.


3. If the LHC runs as planned, we should have a definitive discovery or exclusion of the Standard Model Higgs boson by the end of 2012, and quite possibly as early as next summer.


4. CERN needs a better video streaming server, and physicists in general might possibly benefit from lessons on how to create good presentation slides. (The number of groans about Comic Sans on Twitter was impressive, but I thought the real issue was that a lot of the slides felt cluttered. To be fair, they were trying to convey a lot of information to a highly expert audience.) Also, the term "God particle" should be immediately banned from public discourse.