Everyone in the physics community is eagerly waiting for this week's main event on July 4, when officials at the Large Hadron Collider are expected to present new results on, and possibly the discovery of, the Higgs boson.
As a sort of warm-up act, scientists working on data from the Tevatron at Fermilab in Illinois announced their latest data on July 2, which gives more strong evidence for the existence of the Higgs.
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Supersymmetry: The Future of Physics ExplainedThe Higgs is the final piece of the Standard Model of physics, which explains the interactions between all known subatomic particles and forces, and is required to give all other particles their mass. The mass of the Higgs boson itself is still unknown, though the new Tevatron data corroborate earlier results from both the Tevatron and the LHC that place the Higgs between 115 and 135 gigaelectron volts (GeV), or roughly 115 to 135 times heavier than a proton.
This is the final data to come from the Tevatron’s search for the Higgs. For more than a decade, the Tevatron has been watching elementary particles collide to search for the Higgs. Though it was shut down last year, the massive deluge of information could not be analyzed all at once.
Researchers have been sifting through the data to look for any interesting results. The accelerator smashed together protons and antiprotons at incredibly high speeds and watched as a variety of particles were created in their wake. Because they were so heavy, many of these particles could only exist for fractions of a second before decaying into lighter particles.
Scientists use the laws of physics to calculate the number of expected elementary particles from all these decays. What they hope to see in their data is a tiny excess of subatomic particles coming from an unknown source -- a potential signal for the Higgs.
Because everything in quantum mechanics runs on probability, physicists need to be sure that the excess they see is really exceptionally out of the ordinary and not just some statistical fluke of nature. That’s why they use terms like 3-sigma results, which indicates that an event has only a 0.13 percent chance of happening randomly. The ideal situation is a 5-sigma result, which has only a 0.000028 percent probability of happening by chance.
The new Tevatron data are 2.9-sigma -- a relatively low significance but, because they support the LHC results, they place even greater confidence in the signal being a true indication of the Higgs. Furthermore, the Tevatron sees the Higgs decay in particular ways that the LHC isn’t sensitive to, meaning it could clarify certain properties of the Higgs that the LHC may struggle with.
Image: Part of the 4-mile circumference ring where protons and antiprotons were accelerated to incredible speeds at the Tevatron.Fermilab Visual Media Services
