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CERN manages expectations around Higgs rumours

220px-Rolf-Dieter_Heuer.jpgCERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory, is taking a cautious approach on persistent rumours (see, for example, the ViXra blog) that two experiments at its Large Hadron Collider — ATLAS and the Compact Muon Solenoid, or CMS — have independently found evidence for the Higgs particle with a mass of 125 giga­electronvolts (GeV) — right in the ballpark predicted by the standard model of particle physics.

The Higgs is a missing piece of the standard model thought to endow all other particles with mass. Detailed rumours at Peter Woit’s blog Not Even Wrong say that ATLAS has observed a signal of a Higgs particle at 125 GeV with a significance level of 3.5 sigma — with 3 being enough to claim evidence but 5 needed for a discovery — and that CMS has seen one at 2.5 sigma. As Geoff Brumfiel’s article ‘Higgs hunt enters endgame’ reports, prior results from particle colliders have all but ruled out the Higgs in the ranges below 114 GeV and above 141 GeV.

Physicist Bill Murray, who is leading the ATLAS search for the Higgs, tells Nature that he cannot comment on the latest rumours. That is because work is still in progress to analyse 5 inverse femtobarns of data that have amassed over the summer, with a final decision to approve the current analysis scheduled for Wednesday, 7 December. Murray also notes that such approvals are often delayed. An additional level of management approval will also be necessary before the result can be released at a seminar scheduled for 13 December. “We are moving forward in our understanding of the data and approval process but nothing will be solidly releasable for a while,” Murray says.

In an e-mail to CERN staff reported on Lubos Motl’s blog, Rolf Heuer (pictured), director-general of CERN, seems to manage expectations, noting that a seminar scheduled on 13 December to release the results officially will be unlikely to reveal conclusive evidence for the Higgs particle. “These results will be based on the analysis of considerably more data than those presented at the Summer conferences, sufficient to make significant progress in the search for the Higgs boson, but not enough to make any conclusive statement on the existence or non-existence of the Higgs,” he says.

ViXra comments that a Higgs at 125 GeV is good news for particle physics, because it is favoured by supersymmetric models that would imply that other heavy particles may be found. A heavier Higgs would have meant that the masses of those would be too high to be accessible by the Large Hadron Collider.

Comments

  1. Otto Krog said:

    I have said it before, the Higgs will not be found, at least if my theory is correct.

    My take on dark energy and dark matter is, that they are miscalculations, stemming from our presumption that the speed of light is constant.

    What if the speed of light varies through time and space?

    That creates some interesting theory, at least I think so.

    And the Higgs cannot exist.

    Antimatter is the mind and consciousness of all living entities.

    You are your own universe.

    Reality is where the minds (antimatter) meets the physical universe.

    Interested? Then read my philosophical multiverse theory.

    Google crestroyer theory, and find it instantly.

    https://crestroyertheory.com/the-theory/

  2. Alejandro Rivero said:

    I wonder if the blog collective could be a first step to integrating the amateur community in physics research. Of course we are still far of mathematicians and its Polymath, but some mix between vixra and the n-lab could be near to breakeven.

  3. Anadish Kumar Pal said:

    It’s a non quantum sub ev world out there. Gravitation and mass are due to a very different form of particle or particles, no resemblance with Higgs. Look for DCE research in Sweden, if you want to see the shape of the things to come. Eventually STR will be marginalized and space and mass will be seen as interchangeable. The UFOs are from the sub quantum world which the SM had been trying to write off for a century. It is the inertial locking of space which needs to be understood and STR needs to be modified before LHC folks can read what they see. I had been conducting experiments and some information could be found on my site anadish.com . You may not take me seriously for the time being; however, with ‘time’ things will change, as the need to explain the anomalies at LHC grow!

  4. James T. Dwyer said:

    That there is a directly inverse correspondence between incidental kinetic wave propagation energy and potential localized particle mass energy should be highly instructive as to their directly complementary physical characteristics – they must be two sides of the same coin!

    While a complete Higgs boson may never be found in the residue of a high energy large hadron demolition derby, the mysterious unidentified Higgs field must even now be all around us. What could it possibly be?

    If mass was only allocated to quarks when they were initially emitted into the early universe, for example, perhaps the extreme energy density of the external spacetime into which they were emitted prevented their propagation – instead reconfiguring their kinetic emission energy as the localizing potential energy of mass.

    In this way the ‘particle selection’ function of the Higgs field is provided by the mass-energy density of spacetime, which has temporally diminished with the expansion of the universe. During most of the universe’s history (as now) emitted particles could freely propagate through low-density spacetime: their emission energy is nearly always expressed kinetically (until materially absorbed).

    In this scenario, only the exceedingly high energy density of the very early universe could allocate mass to emitted particles through reconfiguration of their kinetic emission energy. In particle collider experiments, these external fields of localized potential mass energy are dispersed along with the momentum imparted by experimental conditions, allowing composite particles to disintegrate. They may be no ‘Higgs’ particle to detect, just as there are no particles produced by the dispersion of experimentally imparted particle momentum.

    While I cannot properly describe these concepts in the context of established theories, they should help explain why the ill-defined Higgs Mechanism cannot be confirmed!

  5. Jin He said:

    Scientific study enters the stage of life-origin exploration. Electromagnetic and nuclear force are not the root cause of the origin. Gravity will be revealed to connect to the origin.

  6. John Ryskamp said:

    What you should really be looking at is the relation of the CERN experiments to the relativity of simultaneity. Is there a logical flaw in it for which the CERN experiments provide experimental evidence?

    Based on recent advances in the historiography of set theory, the answer is yes. We understand constructivism much better now as a result of this work (Ferreiros, Grattan-Guinness and above Garciadiego’s BERTRAND RUSSELL AND THE ORIGINS OF THE SETTHEORETICPARADOXES,’ which is the masterpiece of the new set theory historiography.

    This work allows us to understand better Poincare’s influence on Einstein, and on Einstein as a constructivist.

    Basically, it shows that Einstein felt the need to make an arbitrary insertion in the formulation of the relativity of simultaneity, in order for it to avoid ending in paradox (this is the constructivist program, since the belief is that all argument logically ends in paradox).

    This intervention is implicity in the 1905 papers, but Einstein made it explicit in the train experiment train experiment in RELATIVITY: THE SPECIAL AND GENERAL THEORIES.

    It was not previously believed Einstein ever put into practice the constructivism he preached in “Geometry and Experience,” because no one could find the intervention. But now we know what it is: it is “natural” coincidence ("fallt zwar…zusammen) which he put in the train experiment. It plays no logical role in formulation. The CERN experiments are not a Standard Model protocol, so they are able to show us how Einstein was led astray with regard to the speed of light.

    https://ssrn.com/abstract=897085

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