Rumours of the Higgs at ATLAS

Many of us on the ATLAS experiment at CERN have been a little more busy than we anticipated this Easter. I tried to explain why on Channel 4 news. You may have seen reports of rumours of …. dramatic findings at the Large Hadron Collider over the past few days. I haven’t commented on them here so far since the rumours are based on an leaked internal document. Nevertheless when Channel 4 asked me about it I though I should go on: So, it is not a hoax. But the rumours are based on an analysis which has to pass many levels of scientific scrutiny before I get very excited by it. It could fail at any stage. If it passes, it will be released by ATLAS , and will then be submitted to a journal. For comparison, journal submission is the stage the CDF bump has got to, and that is far from established yet as a real new physics effect. The thing is, CERN is an exciting place right now. New data are coming in as I write. There are lots of levels of collaboration and competition. Retaining a detached scientific approach is sometimes difficult. And if we can’t always keep clear heads ourselves, it’s not surprising people outside get excited too. This is why we have internal scrutiny, separate teams working on the same analysis, external peer review, repeat experiments, and so on… So don’t go tearing up your particle physics text books just yet. But please stay tuned for when we really do have something to say! These are indeed interesting times. Jon Butterworth guardian.co.uk

Posted by on April 24, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.