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HEP-2011: A whiff of Higgs at the Tevatron?

FermiBlding.jpgGeoff Brumfiel is at the Europhysics Conference on High Energy Physics in Grenoble, France.

Yesterday, a report on the BBC announced that the Tevatron, America’s particle collider, had seen a very faint signal that could be the Higgs particle. That would be remarkable, as it would seem to confirm announcements of a signal at the Large Hadron Collider last week.

But the claim doesn’t exactly add up. The report quoted Stefan Soldner-Rembold, spokesperson for the Tevatron’s DZero detector, as saying that something “intriguing” was happening in the area of 140 GeV. It was a peculiar thing to say because Fermilab, where the Tevatron is based, put out a press release earlier in the week saying that the machine predicted the Higgs would weigh less.

What’s going on? Well, as the BBC report points out, the “signal” is only at the 1 sigma level, meaning it’s got just a 68.3% chance of being right. That’s abysmal by the standards of particle physicists, who need to be 99.9999% sure before declaring a discovery. It’s also quite a bit lower than the confidence level of the signal at the LHC, which currently stands at around 2 sigma, or 99.45%. In a nutshell, the Tevatron may have seen something, but it could just as easily have been wrong.

When I caught up to Pierre Odonne, Fermilab’s director, he declined to comment on the claim, aside from pointing out its low statistical significance. But Rob Roser, the head of Fermilab’s other main experiment CDF, was downbeat on the supposed signal; “You can call it a ‘hint’,” he says. “But I wouldn’t.”

Credit: Fermilab

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