Significant Progress at LHC!

In the seminar back at 12th of December held at CERN presented the current results of the search of Higgs boson. The great news was that some significant progress was made. Yet Higgs boson is still not found, let's check out what's  the latest progress update from CERN is all about.

The main conclusion of the seminar was that the most likely mass ranges of Higgs was discovered to be 116-130 GeV  and  115-127 GeV. What is even more amazing that huge hints of Higgs were detected in the latter mass region, yet it's still too weak to confirm the discovery of the particle.

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Here's a qoute from the press release:

"We have restricted the most likely mass region for the Higgs boson to 116-130 GeV, and over the last few weeks we have started to see an intriguing excess of events in the mass range around 125 GeV," explained ATLAS experiment spokesperson Fabiola Gianotti."This excess may be due to a fluctuation, but it could also be something more interesting. We cannot conclude anything at this stage. We need more study and more data. Given the outstanding performance of the LHC this year, we will not need to wait long for enough data and can look forward to resolving this puzzle in 2012."
"We cannot exclude the presence of the Standard Model Higgs between 115 and 127 GeV because of a modest excess of events in this mass region that appears, quite consistently, in five independent channels," explained CMS experiment Spokesperson, Guido Tonelli. "The excess is most compatible with a Standard Model Higgs in the vicinity of 124 GeV and below but the statistical significance is not large enough to say anything conclusive. As of today what we see is consistent either with a background fluctuation or with the presence of the boson. Refined analyses and additional data delivered in 2012 by this magnificent machine will definitely give an answer."


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So What's Going on at Cern Lately?

So we already know that guys at the LHC haven't found the Higgs boson yet, but what's going on at Cern, home of the Large Hadron Collider?

Well, since Cern is home of the biggest particle smasher in the world it's natural that there's a lot of fuzz going on there right now. Recently scientists working at Cern announced baffling results, which appeared during one of the experiments in the Gran Sasso laboratory.

So what they did was basically sent some neutrinos from Cern to Gran Sasso laboratory, which is 732 km. away. The interesting part is that they detected neutrinos coming to the lab a fraction of a second earlier than they should. The calculations of the speed revealed that neutrinos must have covered the distance in a faster-than-light speed.

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For those of you who don't remember high school physics, light speed at vacuum is one of the most important and well tested constants in science. For more than a hundred years scientists tested  the speed of light and found it to be constant.

"We wanted to find a mistake - trivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effects - and we didn't," said Antonio Ereditato, who was working on the experiment.

Only more independent experiments, which would find the same anomaly would give great evidence that light speed limit is different. However, having in mind that similar anomalies were always resorted, I would bet my money that light speed limit will not be broken.

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So What's Going on at LHC Lately?

So how is the great hunt for the Higg's particle going on in the biggest particle smasher in the world?

Unfortunately, Higgs chasers haven't found the great particle yet, however the collected data indicates a tighter range of possible masses of the hypothetical particle. To fit into standard model of particles Higg's boson has to be lighter than 145 billion electron volts.

Despite this, Higg's particle is still playing hard to get. There were signs of Higgs back in July, when scientists found some particles, which indicated that there might exist a lighter Higgs particle which is really hard to find at low energies.

The good news is that LHC physicist still expect they will either find the Higgs particle or rule out the existence of the famous particle in 2 years. Let's hope this is exactly what's going to happen, after all, it's about time for the good old Peter Higgs to get his Nobel Prize.

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But What Exactly is Lhc?

But What Exactly is Lhc?

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