Friday, December 02, 2011

Higgs rumors at 125 GeV













As we all await CERN's official CMS and ATLAS results for the 2011 Higgs hunt, rumors about its mass have surfaced at notable blogs such as Philip Gibbs' viXra log, Peter Woit's Not Even Wrong and Tommaso Dorigo's Quantum Diaries Survivor. As mentioned by "Alex" in the viXra comment section,
Today rumour is: Higgs at 125 Gev around 2-3 sigma…
Such a rumor, if true, would not only indicate evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson, but is evidence for a light Higgs boson (115-135 GeV), which popular models such as E6 GUTs and M-theory on G2-manifolds predict. Of course, 2-3 sigma evidence isn't really conclusive but it does favor physics beyond the Standard Model. These are exciting times and by December 12 and 13 we'll all get to see if the rumors are true. Moreover, Philip Gibbs has also promised everyone a combined CMS and ATLAS plot once the data is released. How's that for an early Christmas present?

Update: Over at Lubos Motl's TRF blog, a commenter "azerty13" said he received the following email from CERN Director General Rolf Heuer:
Dear colleagues,

I would like to invite you to a seminar in the main auditorium on 13 December at 14:00, at which the ATLAS and CMS experiments will present the status of their searches for the Standard Model Higgs boson. 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. The seminar will also be webcast.

Rolf Heuer

Such an email, if genuine, definitely supports the 2-3 sigma portion of the 125 GeV Higgs mass rumor. Stay tuned.

Update: As mentioned at viXra log, the latest incarnation of the rumor at Woit's blog gives 3.5 sigma in ATLAS and 2.5 sigma in CMS which amounts to about 4.3 sigma combined for the 10/fb. Keep in mind 5 sigma evidence is what is required at this stage of the Higgs hunting game.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice summary of very nice news, I like that :-)

Kea said...

OMG. How on Earth can you still believe in fairies, when you know the Higgs mechanism is about braids ...

Metatron said...

Well, I'm more interested if there's "something" new possibly being there at 124-126 GeV. If it's a Higgs boson, I'd expect it to be the lightest of three, if one is considering a matrix model with manifest triality. For recall that the off-diagonal elements of the Hermitian matrix can be thought of as Higgs fields for the symmetry breaking mechanism.

Koide goes about deriving his relation for the leptons by giving expectation values to three flavor-triplet scalar fields. Giving expectation values to the scalar fields is just a geometrical statement, in going from noncommutative to commutative geometry, via diagonalization.