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Tevatron closes in on the Higgs Boson

VISUAL | March 14, 2012

Physics enthusiasts may have already heard the latest news on the Higgs Boson, which was announced 7 March 2012.

From Symmetry Breaking:

Tevatron physicists told attendees of the Rencontres de Moriond conference this morning that they had found excesses in their data suggestive of a Higgs with a mass between 115-135 gigaelectronvolts. A few months ago, LHC physicists announced similar bumps indicating a Higgs with a mass of between 124-126 GeV.

It's also worth noting that these new Tevatron results are compatible with those released by the Large Hadron Collider in December 2011.

And, of course, all of these results were found with the help of grid computing.

The hunt for the Higgs is not over yet, however. Physicists consider results with a certainty of three sigmas to constitute evidence for the presence of a particle; seven sigmas would be considered a discovery. Unfortunately, these new Tevatron results have a sigma of only 2.2. (For a more in-depth explanation of physics discoveries, check out this Symmetry article.)

This week's visual illustrates the narrowing range of values at which physicists expect to find the Higgs Boson.

Observed and expected exclusion limits for a Standard Model Higgs boson at the 95-percent confidence level for the combined CDF and DZero analyses. The limits are expressed as multiples of the SM prediction for test masses chosen every 5 GeV/c2 in the range of 100 to 200 GeV/c2. The points are joined by straight lines for better readability. The yellow and green bands indicate the 68- and 95-percent probability regions, in the absence of a signal.The difference between the observed and expected limits around 124 GeV could be explained by the presence of a Higgs boson, whose mass would lie between 115 to 135 GeV. The CDF and DZero data exclude a Higgs boson between 147 and 179 GeV/c2 at the 95-percent confidence level. Image courtesy of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.