APS April 2008: Fermilab could rule out one type of Higgs
With all the excitement about the imminent turning on of the LHC, people are forgetting that the Tevatron at Fermilab will be nipping at the LHC's heels for a while. Brian Winer, of Ohio State University, gave an update on the Tevatron and explained how the scientists there are using every trick they can think of to wring more sensitivity out of the machine, such as using artificial neural networks to combine information from two different detection experiments. Also, the Tevatron has been running long enough now, at high enough luminosities, that they are getting enough collisions to make interesting statistics.
As early as this summer, Winer expects that Fermilab will be able to to statistically rule out the existence of a 160 GeV Higgs boson, one of the theoretically likely masses for the so-called “God particle.” (Barring a positive detection, of course.) It will be a lot harder for them to detect a lower-mass Higgs boson before the LHC starts pumping out data. But who knows?
As a tantalizing treat, Winer put up a picture, a couple years old, of a detection of a particle that had the perfect characteristics of the Higgs. Only problem was, the particle was four times as likely to be noise.
Now, if they could only get four or five more detections in the same spot, then they'd be in business.
Winer repeated the exhortation of a colleague: “We're one good idea away from finding this thing.”
Comments
The Hunt for the “God Particle”
Near religious status of the Theory of General Relativity (GR) and the reductionist paradigm of modern physics have effectively reduced it into an exclusive goal seeking enterprise; undermining the empirical basis, which was once the greatest strength of natural science. Near complete monopoly of funding and facilities for research; heavy reliance on political and governmental agencies have rendered natural science ever more vulnerable to politico-ideological manipulation on the profound ontological questions of reality at macrocosm and microcosm.
The hunt for Higg’s boson like COBE is such a goal seeking effort that has profound implications for humanity. Natural science must be extremely careful in making any definitive claims on these fundamental ontological questions – questions that may forever be elusive to human epistemology.
This is particularly important in a politically charged atmosphere where strong subjective efforts are being made to bring back medieval absolutism, by striving to bring an “End of Science”, “End of History” etc. based on some “absolute truths” of natural science itself.
Any positive claim (no matter how tenuous) on the discovery of Higg’s boson; like the COBE’s claim of the Big Bang creation of the universe is certain to bring Nobel, Templeton etc. awards and severely limit further debate on these fundamental issues. I have tried to draw attention to these questions in some recent articles (links below”):
http://blogs.nature.com/news/blog/2006/10/cosmic_ripples_net_physics_pri.html
http://redshift.vif.com/JournalFiles/V12NO2PDF/V12N2MAL.pdf
Abdul Malek
E-mail: abdulmalek@qc.aibn.com
Posted by: Abdul Malek | May 7, 2008 05:12 PM