With the quarry cornered, the real hunt for the Higgs boson begins!

The CERN has announced that the Higgs boson, a.k.a. the God particle, has been glimpsed with a mass in the vicinity of 126 GeV and with a general restriction between 115.5 GeV and 131 GeV (95% confidence level, or CL) with a 3.6-sigma local precision and a 2.3-sigma global precision at a luminosity of 4.9 inverse-femtobarn (fb^-1) by the ATLAS experiment.

In other words, there does exist a good chance of a quarry, and the quarry has been cornered.

[caption id="attachment_20965" align="aligncenter" width="530" caption="From the presentation by ATLAS's Fabiola Gianotti (unfortunate that she had to use Comic Sans)"][/caption]

This means physicists know that the mass of the Higgs boson is not in the high-mass region (above 200 GeV) but in the low-mass region (<200 GeV). Consequently, the channels that are tracking events in this region will be watched specifically and more carefully in the checks that will be run in 2012. The checks are necessary because the events will now have to be studied with greater luminosity (measured by the inverse-femtobarn) and because the standard deviation of the errors will have to be brought down from 0.54011 GeV/c² (2.3-sigma) precision to 0.00023 GeV/c² (5-sigma).

[caption id="attachment_20968" align="aligncenter" width="530" caption="The yellow box shows what will change during the 2012 checks"][/caption]

In order to detect the Higgs boson in the vicinity of 125 GeV to 126 GeV at the 5-sigma tolerance level, the luminosity will have to be increased from what is now 4.9 fb^-1 to 20 fb^-1. Also, the low-mass observation channels will each have to have a precision high enough to keep deviations below 0.400138 GeV/c². The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment has also done a good job of excluding energy levels in between 127 GeV and 600 GeV with a 95% CL, and from between 117 GeV to 543 GeV with a 99% CL.

[caption id="attachment_20970" align="aligncenter" width="530" caption="The exclusion limits arrived at by the CMS experiment"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_20969" align="aligncenter" width="530" caption="The center chart shows the broad excess just above the mean-mark, a flat plateau that points at an event "somewhere there", and the chart on the right, corresponding to a high-sensitivity detection channel, shows a sharp peak (toward the left) - a finer image of the plateau."][/caption]

The final results and papers will be published by the end of January, together with an update on the installation of new channels and refined analyses. The high-points of the entire experiment were the 95% CL exclusion of the 127-600 GeV range and the observation of a small excess of events in the 115-127 GeV mass range with a (high) deviation of 0.62009 GeV/c². Because of the low precision, the observation could also have been a result of background fluctuations in the experiments, necessitating a verification in 2012 - which will yield a definite answer.