Tantalizing Signs of Higgs Boson Found By U.S. Tevatron Collider

By Rebecca Boyle Posted 07.02.2012 at 11:05 am 9 Comments

Tevatron at Night The Tevatron typically produced about 10 million proton-antiproton collisions per second. Each collision produced hundreds of particles. The CDF and DZero experiments recorded about 200 collisions per second for further analysis. Fermilab

If the Tevatron was a metal detector sweeping across a proverbial beach, the beeps of discovery would have been coming in very close succession at the end of its life. It was, we have learned, extremely close to finding the treasured Higgs boson ... and then, last September, it shut down. Only another, more powerful detector, owned by someone else, will finally be able to grab it.

This is the situation facing the scientists of Fermilab today, who announced their final Higgs search results from the storied Tevatron particle collider. For a while now, scientists working with the CDF and DZero experiments have been fairly sure they’ve not seen the Higgs boson, ruling out mass-energy ranges where it cannot exist. But this is the first time they think they’ve seen something.

The Higgs boson, named for Scottish physicist Peter Higgs, is the last great puzzle piece in the prevailing theory of physics. It's thought to somehow endow all other particles with mass, which is why it's sometimes nicknamed the "God particle." It has to exist for the so-called Standard Model of particles and forces to hold up, and it's been the Holy Grail of modern science for decades.

Newly crunched evidence suggests the Tevatron may have seen this putative particle several times in its life, when considering all 500 trillion collisions for each of its experiments since March of 2001. The observed Higgs signs have a statistical significance of 2.9 sigma, according to Fermilab. This means there is only a 1-in-550 chance that the signal is due to a statistical fluctuation. This means it really might be the Higgs.

Only the Large Hadron Collider will be able to verify this — and even then, only somewhat. The two colliders smash together different kinds of particles and at different energies, which yields slightly different results. The Tevatron collided protons and antiprotons, and the LHC collides protons with protons. According to the Standard Model, particles decay into their constituent parts, and the Higgs boson can decay in several ways, depending on what’s smashed. Fermilab’s Kurt Riesselmann compared it to a vending machine returning the same amount of change, but with different combinations of coins.

At the Tevatron, experiments see the Higgs particle decaying into a pair of bottom quarks (a bottom and an anti-bottom, to be specific). At the LHC, however, the Higgs would show up as a pair of highly energetic photons. Eventually, the LHC will be able to verify the particle in all potential channels, when it reaches its peak energy output likely next year. But for now, in this particular niche of decay, the Tevatron seems to have the edge.

This announcement, and a paper describing the results, comes two days before a much-anticipated briefing at CERN describing the latest LHC results. That conference is widely expected to bring news of a Higgs result — perhaps a further narrowing of the search parameters, like what Tevatron scientists announced today, or maybe even a real, 5-sigma, 100-percent sure-thing discovery. Stay tuned.

What the Tevatron Found: Analyzing more than 10 years of data produced by the Tevatron collider, scientists from the CDF and DZero experiments have found their strongest indication to date for the long-sought Higgs particle. The Tevatron results indicate that the Higgs particle, if it exists, has a mass between 115 and 135 GeV/c2, or about 130 times the mass of the proton. Fermilab

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9 Comments

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intrepidDesign

07/02/12 at 3:30 pm

Seems like a waste to have shut the Tevatron down. Can't it be used for something else? Smashing other types of particles, looking for things, conducting other science besides Higgs hunting? No?

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tcolguin

07/02/12 at 7:21 pm

The Tevatron is the largest of 8, but certainly not the old collider. It says that its part will be reused, and other experiments and and uses for the location will go on. Plus they have years of data that might be mined for looking for the Higgs particle and such.
http://www.fnal.gov/pub/presspass/press_releases/2012/Higgs-Tevatron-20120702.html

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Greenmatrix

07/02/12 at 10:52 pm

It's funny how these scientist at the long closed down tevatron always come up with 'updates' just before big CERN conferences. Seems like attention seekers who just want to shout they should still be funded. Rememer last year they claimed at some point nothing was found in all their old lower energy research. Then at the end of last year CERN for the first time saw real strong hints of the Higgs Boson. Shortly thereafter tevatron scientist suddenly claimed seeing evidence as well in their old data. Now with far more data gathered at CERN since last year expect the Higgs range into atleast a 4 Sigma level. This is not about verifying the tevatron. The LHC is far superior on many levels. From total data collected to much higher enery ranges and also the unrivaled quality of CERN's enormous detectors.

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ThomasPerraudin

07/03/12 at 4:57 am

I agree with you @Greenmatrix

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uldissprogis

07/06/12 at 3:55 am

It is amazing how scientists are continuing to try and prove the unprovable. The Higgs Bozon is supposedly a particle smaller than a photon and can't be measured according to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Trying to prove the existance of a particle which can not be measured is a fraud because if you can't measure something, you can't prove it's existance!

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Bob Hope

07/08/12 at 3:56 pm

Since Fermilab was sifting through over 500 trillion collisions for each experiment that occurred during a period of over 10 years ... And since the US is notorious for underfunding science projects (which do not involve 'defense' contracting) ... It would not be at all surprising to eventually learn that the Tevatron discovered the Higgs Boson years ago, and simply didn't have the means to sort through all the data generated and required to actually know it had happened ... In fact, it would be surprising if that does not turn out to be the case.

And thanks to the funding process of starving the education of the population, most citizens have no idea how much they don't know ... Or the extreme importance of learning/knowing a lot more ...

When 'everyone is a genius', and few folks know what they are talking about ... It's a recipe for ongoing devolvment of the culture and the economy ...

We can only hope for better policies in the future, to turn around that gruesome trajectory of the past few generations of US policies ...

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