aamukherjee:

Higgs Boson-Like Particle Discovery at LHC

I was asking for big news yesterday and it doesn’t get more massive than this. Both CMS and Atlas have seen a ‘bump’ in their data that has been collected at the LHC on the Franco-Swiss border corresponding to a particle weighing in at about 125-126 GeV which is around 130 times heavier than the proton. They have attained a confidence level at around the 4.9/5 sigma meaning that there is roughly a 1 in 2 million chance that there is no new particle.

They have NOT necessarily discovered the Higgs boson because they haven’t confirmed that this new particle is the Higgs; they’ve only looking at the mass of the particle. It could be something else with a mass of 125 GeV. To actually claim it is the Higgs, they need to confirm that it has spin 0, the right coupling ratios, and other predicted properties. Nevertheless, if it is a deviation from what the Standard Model it means that this is new physics at work and that could serve as a window into completely new realms of study.