A four-lepton decay, one option that the Standard Model provides for getting rid of a Higgs.
This week, the European physics lab CERN will be hosting an announcement (scheduled for early on July 4th). It's expected that strong evidence for the Higgs boson will be presented. Rumors about exactly what will be announced are swirling, but most informed expectations indicate a very strong signal that falls just short of the standard for discovery. To set the stage for that announcement, Fermilab hosted two seminars today that gave an update on the search for the Higgs performed at the Tevatron, its now-defunct particle collider.
The Higgs is the last undiscovered particle predicted by the Standard Model; it mediates the interactions that give particles mass. Although its existence was proposed decades ago, direct evidence for the particle has been hard to come by. This is because it is very heavy, and because other processes produce very similar signals. (See this for an explanation about how we find a signal in the background noise). When we last checked in on the search back in March, the Tevatron had left the door open in a broad region around 115-135GeV, while the LHC's detectors had seen hints of a signal around 125GeV.
With the Tevatron having been shut down, there was no new data for the folks from Fermilab to discuss. What they have done in the mean time, however, is improve their analysis of the data they do have. Many of the decay processes that look like the Higgs can be partly distinguished from background events based on the specific details of the spray of particles produced. Scientists at Fermi have been developing neural networks that are better at separating out the different types of collisions. For the D0 detector alone, the improved analysis got them a 20 to 30 percent boost in sensitivity using the same data.
Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments
DIGITAL JUICE
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thank's!