Reflection: Higgs Status at the End of 2011

Refined Higgs Rumours (by Philip E. Gibbs): We report here refined Higgs rumours before the December 13, 2011 announcement by CERN about Higgs search results of LCH. http://prespacetime.com/index.php/pst/article/view/320

Higgs Boson Live Blog: Analysis of the CERN Announcement (by Philip E. Gibbs): We report here live on LHC Higgs results announcement by CERN on December 13, 2011. The result is very convincing if one starts from the assumption that there should be a Higgs Boson somewhere in the range. Everywhere is ruled out except 115 GeV to 130 GeV and within that window there is a signal with the right strength at around 125 GeV with 3 sigma significance. CERN will have to wait for that to reach 5 sigma to claim discovery and next year’s data should be enough to get there or almost. I calculate that they will need 25/fb per experiment at 7 TeV to make the discovery. A big congratulation goes to everyone from the LHC, ATLAS and CMS who found the clear hints of Higgs when it hid in the hardest place. http://prespacetime.com/index.php/pst/article/view/321

Has CERN Found the God Particle? A Calculation (by Philip E. Gibbs): Following the CERN announcement on December 13, 2011, physicists have been giving some very different assessments of the chances that the ATLAS and CMS detectors have seen the Higgs boson. Combining the three things I will consider, I get an overall probability for such a strong signal if there is no Higgs to be about 1 in 30. Perhaps I have failed to account for combinations where more than one of these effects could combine. That requires further coincidences but lets just call the overall result 1 in twenty. In other words, everything considered I take the observed result to be a two sigma effect. http://prespacetime.com/index.php/pst/article/view/322