Level: Jedi Master
There's some glad news that's come in today from the Tevatron at Chicago, IL. The analysis of the data it collected last year before shutting down in September shows an excess of events in the mass range of 115-135 GeV/c2, with a precision of 2.8 sigma (97.4% CL). This result coincides with the ATLAS and CMS results declared on December 13 last year, providing the broader scientific community and the world the first glimpse of the Higgs boson.
The results were announced at the ongoing Moriond Conference - spanning seven days from March 3 to March 10 - in La Thuile, Italy, which opened with an address by Prof. Francois Englert, one of the contributors who shaped the Higgs mechanism. Ever since the ATLAS/CMS results came out, one important thing as far as the hunt for the Higgs boson is concerned that scientists have learned is the different ways in which the elusive particle can decay. They have used this information to add more readout channels to existing ones at the ATLAS/CMS (two W-boson channels for the former) detectors as well as at the CDF and D-Zero detectors at the Tevatron. Each of these channels will track and monitor one decay channel, or one mode of decay.
Because the Tevatron has shut down, the data it's yielded is more or less final; the only improvisations that can arise will be from refinement of the data. At the same time, apart from the addition of channels, the LHC will also run at a beam intensity of 4 TeV/beam instead of the 3.5 TeV/beam it's been running with in 2010 and 2011. This can be attributed to the encouraging results that have been returned by the experiments hunting for the Higgs boson. The bunch-spacing will remain at 50 nanoseconds.
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