Researchers at Fermilab’s Tevatron particle collider are talking big this week as they prepare to present new measurements narrowing down even further the mass of the elusive Higgs boson, e.g. you know what. With 10 years of data on its side and that mass range the tightest it’s ever been, this makes the Tevatron now the “frontrunner” in the race for the Higgs, says Fermilab physicist Rob Roser.Basically, at two detectors/experiments at the Illinois collider researchers are recording and analyzing data from collisions. The more collisions you do, the more possible masses you can exclude for the Higgs, and the more likely it is for a Higgs signal to appear in the data. The exclusion range currently looks like this (LEP is the predecessor to the Large Hadron Collider, by the by):So maybe you have some idea of how challenging this process is by now. It’s not a matter of a Higgs just appearing and everyone throwing a big party and god pouting out in the yard with a bottle of Jack; you first have to find out what the Higgs looks like by eliminating all of the things it couldn’t look like. You do this by looking at the particles other than the Higgs that would be created with in a collision, like a W or Z boson, and subtracting their mass range, which we do know.Perhaps most enticingly, Dmitri Denisov of Fermilab hints at the possibility of the hunt’s end happening at the Tevatron before it shuts down in September: "If the Higgs boson exists, hints of its presence will emerge from the Tevatron data. If it does not exist, the CDF and DZero collaborations expect to rule out the remainder of the allowed mass range and scientists would have to wonder again: how do fundamental particles acquire mass?"Related:
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