Higgs Preview

I’m a bit slow to post anything about the ongoing bout of Higgs-steria that’s been engulfing the interwebs in recent days. Even Andy Lawrence got there ahead of me.  What’s caused all the commotion is an announcement about an announcement from CERN at a special seminar tomorrow (Wednesday 4th July) at 9am CEST, which is 8am British “Summer” Time.  Here’s a bit of the press release:

CERN will hold a scientific seminar at 9:00 CEST on 4 July to deliver the latest update in the search for the Higgs boson. At this seminar, coming on the eve of this year’s major particle physics conference, ICHEP, in Melbourne, the ATLAS and CMS experiments will deliver the preliminary results of their 2012 data analysis.

“Data taking for ICHEP concluded on Monday 18 June after a very successful first period of LHC running in 2012,” said CERN’s Director for Accelerators and Technology, Steve Myers. “I’m very much looking forward to seeing what the data reveals.”

The 2012 LHC run schedule was designed to deliver the maximum possible quantity of data to the experiments before the ICHEP conference, and with more data delivered between April and June 2012 than in the whole 2011 run, the strategy has been a success. Furthermore, the experiments have been refining their analysis techniques to improve their efficiency in picking out Higgs-like events from the millions of collisions occurring every second. This means that their sensitivity to new phenomena has significantly increased for both years’ data sets.  The crunching of all this data has been done by the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid, which has exceeded its design specifications to handle the unprecedented volume of data and computing.

“We now have more than double the data we had last year,” said CERN Director for Research and Computing, Sergio Bertolucci, “that should be enough to see whether the trends we were seeing in the 2011 data are still there, or whether they’ve gone away. It’s a very exciting time.”

I won’t try to repeat what’s been said better and more authoritatively elsewhere; a nice collection of video material at the STFC website and a piece by Sean Carroll (also here) are worth mentioning if you’re not up on why the Higgs Boson is so important.

I wrote  a rather facetious post about the last episode of Higgs-mania way back in December because I found the actual announcement to be a bit of a damp squib and the associated hype rather irritating. This time there are even more rumours flying around – not to everyone’s approval – but it’s obviously best to wait and see what is actually announced rather than comment on them.

The main question in my mind is whether it’s sufficiently interesting to get up in time to watch the seminar 8am tomorrow morning…

Brian Cox is 44.

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