{"id":3916,"date":"2011-08-18T19:54:27","date_gmt":"2011-08-18T23:54:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=3916"},"modified":"2011-08-24T10:47:59","modified_gmt":"2011-08-24T14:47:59","slug":"sunday-night-higgs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=3916","title":{"rendered":"Sunday Night Higgs?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lepton-Photon 2011 begins Monday morning, the schedule is here<\/a>. It should start off with a bang, with the latest Higgs search results from ATLAS and CMS presented starting at 11:20am local time, the middle of Sunday night here. There will be a press conference on Wednesday.<\/p>\n

If the hints of a Higgs signal seen in the data presented last month at EPS-HEP 2011 are real, they should be more pronounced in the new data (the experiments have now collected about twice as much data as that used in the analyses presented at EPS-HEP 2011). The Higgs Combination Group should by now have produced a combined analysis using last month’s data from the ATLAS + CMS and presumably that will also be released on Monday or soon thereafter. They have just today released a new document giving the details of how the combination is done: Procedure for the LHC Higgs boson search combination in summer 2011<\/a>. Still holding out on us though in terms of the real data, that document just shows toy data…<\/p>\n

Update<\/strong>: The latest rumor I’m hearing is that the only analyses updated with new data (nearly twice as much) since EPS-HEP that will be available Monday will be from individual channels. Analyses combining the different channels won’t be ready for another 2 to 3 weeks. I still think though that we should see the CMS+ATLAS combination of the old data shown at EPS-HEP. So, if the Higgs is there, a definitive signal may still not quite yet be available. These people do need to take a vacation sometime in the summer…<\/p>\n

Update:<\/strong> The news is that CMS<\/a> and ATLAS<\/a> have produced new combinations (although the combination of older ATLAS + CMS data has not been released, and I’d love to know why…). The bottom line is that the hints of a Higgs around 140 GeV have weakened with the addition of more data. A simplified summary of the current situation would be:<\/p>\n

  • No Higgs above 145 GeV<\/li>\n
  • In the region 135-145 GeV, both experiments are seeing somewhat more events than expected from background, but less than expected if there really was a Higgs there.<\/li>\n
  • Not enough data to say anything about 115-135 GeV, the Higgs could still be hiding there. If so, a malicious deity has carefully chosen the Higgs mass to make it as hard as possible for physicists to study it.<\/li>\n

    More details available on the conference slides that should be available here<\/a>. Tommaso Dorigo<\/a> and Matt Strassler<\/a> have commentary.<\/p>\n

    Update:<\/strong> Still no word on why no CMS+ATLAS combination has appeared. Philip Gibbs has hacked together an unofficial version (see here<\/a> and here<\/a>). Comparing the EPS data to the latest, one sees clearly that a marginally significant signal consistent with a Higgs has weakened quite a bit with the new data (and thus, there was little to no evidence for such a Higgs in the new data). Also worth reading, commentary from Jester here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Lepton-Photon 2011 begins Monday morning, the schedule is here. It should start off with a bang, with the latest Higgs search results from ATLAS and CMS presented starting at 11:20am local time, the middle of Sunday night here. There will … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-experimental-hep-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3916","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3916"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3916\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3920,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3916\/revisions\/3920"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}