Wednesday, July 4, 2012

The Trenches of Discovery: A Higgs Hunter's story...

Here it is, finally

[I assume the readers of this blog are somewhat familiar with the Higgs boson; if not, there's a nice summary on the CMS pages here]

So, this is the follow-up to the teaser I wrote a week ago. Now that everybody knows we found a Higgs boson at 125.3±0.6 GeV, I'm free to talk about our finding, what it means and how we got there. Note the intentional use of 'a' Higgs there: although we, beyond reasonable doubt (less than one in a million chance of an error, to be precise), found a new particle, it's not 100% sure yet if it's *the* Higgs boson predicted by the standard model, or one of its many twins predicted by the hundreds of theories out there. There's even a tiny chance of it being an altogether different particle yet.

Read the rest at The Trenches of Discovery